File This Under "No Surprise at All"

When you eliminate racial preferences at Boston's exam schools, the number of minority students drops.

Comments

[matt]

Those that remain, however, are known to be there on their own merit.

[carpundit]

Well, at least those who were accepted after the race-based preferences ended. I'm pretty sure the school didn't expel students accepted as part of a preference program. So, yes, once every student who was accepted for his race has graduated, then any students there are known to be meritorious.

Maybe that's now. I don't know.

[adamg]

It's not necessarily quite that, um, black and white. Two things stuck out (at least for me) at the end of that story. One was that at least some people think Latin is a private school (hey, if I were a relatively new arrival to Boston, I might think that, too), so they never bothered to have their children apply. I saw something similar at work a couple of years ago when we joined a parents' group that exists solely to figure out how to play the BPS lottery system in the West Zone. The group members were overwhelmingly white. Why? Because black and Hispanic parents don't care? Or because they didn't even know the group existed?

The other is, yes, dammit, racial socioeconomic disparites, specifically: Well-off white kids in West Roxbury have parents who can afford Stanley Kaplenesque prep classes for the Latin exams, poor black kids in Mattapan do not.

[carpundit]

I don't see that we disagree on anything here. I'm sure there are all kinds of disparities at play that keep minority enrollment down. All I'm saying is that the end result (fewer minorities) should have been obvious when the preferences ended. Did anyone really think the minority levels would be kept high after the preferences?

I didn't mean to go into WHY fewer minorities get in. Merely THAT fewer do.

[russian doctor]

Those that remain, however, are known to be there on their own merit.