02.17.2025

Wu empty-handed when it comes to Boston safest city boast | Hub exam school admissions, the subject of furious debate, could draw Trump administration scrutiny | The phony media controversy over Josh Kraft’s supposedly crippling conflicts of interest | Quick hits |

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Showdown looms: New Trump education policy banning use of race could spell trouble for Boston’s controversial exam school diversity initiative

Boston’s hotly contested revamp of admissions to its traditionally elite exam schools faces another potential challenge, this time from the Trump administration.

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Education sparked national attention with a letter to state education departments demanding that schools ditch all diversity, equity and inclusion policies in two weeks or lose federal funding.

And the new Trump administration policy goes beyond a ban on the consideration of race in everything from admissions to hiring, to also include a prohibition on the use of “non-racial information as a proxy for race,” according to the letter from the Department of Education’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Craig Trainor.

That would seem to raise major problems for Boston’s ongoing and now years-long effort to completely overhaul admissions to Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy and the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science.

On paper, the new exam school admissions process sorts students not on race, but into different tiers based on socio-economic factors.

In practice, traditionally white sections of the city, like West Roxbury, are jammed into a single tier or two where demand for seats at these schools is the highest.

The number of seats is then capped at a level that is nowhere near enough to meet demand, leaving students with stellar grades and nearly perfect scores with rejection letters.

Last week, BPS officials reinforced that impression with a presentation on the new admissions standards that noted that exam school seats granted to white applicants had declined to 25 percent, down from 40 percent.

That number rose to 22 percent for Black students, up from 13 percent, BPS officials said. The percentage of students at the city’s exam schools that BPS classifies as Latinx rose to 26 percent, up from 21 percent.

“When I read the … letter, it screamed to me that the Trump DOE (for as long as it exists?) would apply it to selective high school admissions,” noted one Boston attorney and resident closely following the exam school admissions debate. “The school committee chart … would seem to be enough to draw the admin’s wrath.”

As Contrarian Boston reported on Friday, the Trump administration's moves come as a group of Boston parents works with a national law firm on another potential legal challenge to the admissions policy.

The parents suffered a setback last December when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to an earlier version of the new admissions policy.

If nothing else, the new Trump policy now opens up another avenue for parents upset over exam school admissions.

And don’t be surprised if they pursue it.

Big claim but little data: Facing reelection, Wu boasts that Boston is the nation’s safest city, but can’t or won’t provide numbers to back it up

By Colman M. Herman

Last June, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu told The Boston Globe, “We’re really proud that Boston is the safest major city in the country.” No equivocation there.