Lured me back in with the Boston Latin reference. I am going off memory with the original study that I thought demonstrated limited grasp of how the exam school thing works in Boston. The big difference with BLS versus Stuyvesant is that there weren't then (and even more so today) enough high quality performers to fill a class of 400 such that a study comparing the bottom tier of kids at BLS is simply studying a group of well off underperformers who had the benefit of test prep (and/or inflated parochial school grades). They are the kids the NAACP rightly complains about (yet then failed to create a new system that bumped the undeserving). That 20-40% of kids, those that were over-rated from the outset, do little upon arrival to distinguish themselves from those that weren't admitted. They cheat, take the easiest classes and head off to some open enrollment college. Utilizing them to study whether the exam schools work is like a study of the bottom NBA draft picks in the old days when they had 12 rounds (today there are 2 rounds) and the Celtics would draft friends of the owner's dentist in the late rounds because there weren't enough talented players to make 12 picks. If you studied the undrafted versus the bottom draft picks you would find no difference.
Such an interesting comment (and delighted to have you back!). I think the study indicates that even these kids do better on the SAT verbal and take more AP classes and get better scores at BLS than if they ended up elsewhere.
Lured me back in with the Boston Latin reference. I am going off memory with the original study that I thought demonstrated limited grasp of how the exam school thing works in Boston. The big difference with BLS versus Stuyvesant is that there weren't then (and even more so today) enough high quality performers to fill a class of 400 such that a study comparing the bottom tier of kids at BLS is simply studying a group of well off underperformers who had the benefit of test prep (and/or inflated parochial school grades). They are the kids the NAACP rightly complains about (yet then failed to create a new system that bumped the undeserving). That 20-40% of kids, those that were over-rated from the outset, do little upon arrival to distinguish themselves from those that weren't admitted. They cheat, take the easiest classes and head off to some open enrollment college. Utilizing them to study whether the exam schools work is like a study of the bottom NBA draft picks in the old days when they had 12 rounds (today there are 2 rounds) and the Celtics would draft friends of the owner's dentist in the late rounds because there weren't enough talented players to make 12 picks. If you studied the undrafted versus the bottom draft picks you would find no difference.
Such an interesting comment (and delighted to have you back!). I think the study indicates that even these kids do better on the SAT verbal and take more AP classes and get better scores at BLS than if they ended up elsewhere.