Advanced classes like Maureen Costa’s at Hennigan Elementary School, where students learn physics as early as fourth grade, have been the best ticket into Boston Latin and the city’s other elite exam schools for years.
But inside the accelerated classes at the Hennigan and other public schools in the city, the pipeline to exam schools is starting to look a lot less like Boston’s public schools. Black and Hispanic students fill 44 percent of the 968 seats in the accelerated classes in the school district, though they make up more than three-quarters of Boston’s students overall. White and Asian students now occupy 55 percent of the seats, though they are only 23 percent of the district.
In particular, the number of black students, now at 239, in the classes has dropped by half since 1999, when the city stopped using racial quotas to assign students to the classes.
The low enrollment of the school system’s largest racial and ethnic groups in the classes renews debate about whether all children, particularly black students, are getting equal opportunities in the city’s schools, an issue that has long rocked Boston.
“It’s not a true picture of what the city is,” said Costa, who presides over a majority white and Asian fourth-grade accelerated class in a school that is 85 percent black and Hispanic. “You can’t tell me that all black children aren’t capable of achieving like white children. I wouldn’t buy that.”
Prior to 1999, black students filled about half of the seats in the advanced classes. Now, all students are admitted to the classes based only on their score on a national standardized test. School district leaders feared lawsuits if they kept racial quotas for the program; a 1998 federal court ruling banned racial quotas in exam school admissions. Since then, black and Hispanic enrollment at Boston Latin, the most competitive exam school, has declined.
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(Posted on December 19, 2005)