A Boston federal court judge on Tuesday is expected to hear oral arguments in a racial discrimination case brought by a group of white and Asian parents who contend that temporary changes to the admission policies for Boston’s highly regarded exam schools could disadvantage their children.
The arguments come one day after more than two dozen civil rights and other organizations announced they had filed briefs in support of the changes made last fall by the Boston School Committee.
The changes — crafted in light of the pandemic — temporarily suspend the entrance exam, at which Asian and white students excelled in higher proportions. The school district instead will allocate seats based on student grades and ZIP codes, prioritizing areas with the greatest concentration of poverty.
While the changes are temporary, many parents and civil rights leaders hope the move will lead to a permanent overhaul of the city’s criteria for admitting students to Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science. Concerns over inequitable access to the exam schools have persisted for decades.
“It’s a potentially historic case,” said Robert Trestan, the New England regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, in an interview Monday. “For far too long there has been inequitable access to the exam schools, especially for students of color and students who live in the lowest-income neighborhoods.”
The ADL filed a brief on behalf of the school system’s changes, officials announced on Monday. It was signed by several other organizations, including the Boston Bar Association, the Boston Celtics, and the Boston Red Sox.
The Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp., representing several white and Asian applicants, filed the lawsuit in February to block implementation of the temporary changes.
The lawsuit is the most significant challenge to a change in admission policies at the exam schools since the 1990s, when white parents sued in two separate lawsuits.
The first lawsuit in federal court led to Boston school officials ending a practice, developed under court-ordered desegregation, that set aside at least 35 percent of exam school seats for Black and Latino students.
However, the resulting admission policy, which used race more loosely as one of several factors in a good portion of the exam-school admission decisions, quickly attracted another lawsuit by parents of a white student. In 1998, a US Appeals Court found the new policy was unconstitutional, resulting in Boston school officials creating a policy that left race out of the equation. School officials tinkered with that policy last fall.
The group challenging the current changes contends that school officials “imposed upon the school children of Boston a racial and ethnic classification system for entry into its most prestigious public schools” that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
School data presented before the School Committee approved the changes showed that they would likely lead to a reduction in the proportion of Asian and white applicants who would secure seats.
The proposal generated further controversy on the night of the School Committee vote when then-Chairman Michael Loconto was caught on a hot mic, after a group of speakers with Asian-sounding names were announced, mocking their names. Some observers later said it sounded like he used some Black names too.
For years, Asian and white applicants have had much better luck securing seats at the exam schools. At the most sought after exam school, Boston Latin School, 45 percent of the 2,500 students are white and 29 percent are Asian, three times higher than the school district. Black and Latino students collectively account for only 21 percent of the seats, even though they comprise 72 percent of all students districtwide.
Meanwhile, less than 20 percent of all students at Latin School are economically disadvantaged, compared to 63 percent districtwide.
The lawsuit has thrown a wrench into the admission process for this year, prompting school officials to delay sending out acceptance letters until mid-April or later. That timeline, roughly a month later than usual, is increasing the likelihood that many families could end up paying non-refundable deposits for private schools while they wait for exam school admission notifications.
If Judge William G. Young rules in favor of the plaintiff, it would raise lots of questions: Would school officials need to create a new plan? Would students need to apply again?
Students are applying for seventh and ninth grades.
The case also could have broad implications for increasing access to the exam schools among all children across the city, said Tanisha Sullivan, president of the NAACP, an intervener in the case.
“The policy as designed will increase the geographic and socioeconomic diversity” of the exam schools, she said. “That is the intention and that is what we hope it will do.”
Sullivan is cochair of a school task force that is examining the prospect of permanent changes to the exam-school admission policy.
Nearly two dozen other organizations — separate from the ADL group — filed another brief in support of the school system, contending that both the suspension of the admission test and the allocation of seats by ZIP code were big steps towards improving the socioeconomic, racial, and geographic diversity of its exam schools and “rectifying past discrimination.”
“By using ZIP codes ranked by median household income as a criterion for admission to the exam schools, the admission plan will give students from low-income neighborhoods a better opportunity to access the high-quality education offered at the exam schools,” according to the according to one of the briefs filed by 23 organizations including the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, LatinoJustice PLRDEF, Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
“Additionally, increasing socioeconomic diversity in schools makes it more likely that one day, students will live in diverse or mixed-income neighborhoods, helping to mitigate the detrimental impact of Boston’s historical discriminatory housing practices.”
Brian Alosco, an associate with the Boston law firm Brown Rudnick LLP who is assisting the 23 groups who filed the brief, said ZIP codes in Boston no longer strictly correlate to race, noting greater integration in its neighborhoods, and that it is wrong to consider that measure as a proxy for race.
James Vaznis can be reached at james.vaznis@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @globevaznis.
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