The Boston Globe’s 3% Boston Latin panic
“Minority numbers plunge at Latin” screamed a Boston Globe headline after public exam high school Boston Latin statistics showed that non-white enrollment at the school is down a whopping 3.6 percentage points since 1998/99, the last year the school used race as merit, from 49.7% to 46.1%.
Plunge, indeed.
In order to milk maximum indignation over the “plunge,” the paper focuses exclusively on Latino and black students, who, predictably, fared horribly without the support of racial favoritism: Black enrollment went from 18.5% to 10.3%, Latino to 5.3% from 8.4%.
Ignored by the Globe article are the massive gains by Asian students, who increased their share to 30% from 22.7% in 1998/99, dwarfing gains by white students.
Boston’s overall student population was more than 75 percent black and Hispanic in the last school year, but the two groups made up less than 16 percent of Latin School pupils. They made up nearly 27 percent of enrollment in 1998-99, the last academic year before the court ruling took effect barring the use of race in admissions.
While white students make up 14 percent of the city’s schools overall, they are nearly 54 percent of the student body at the Latin School. The class that enters the school Sept. 8 continues the trend.
”I would like it to have a higher representation of black and Latino students than it does,” Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant said in an interview. ”It was possible to do with the set-aside, and it’s been harder to do without it.”
Payzant said the Latin School — where the number of black students dropped from 435 to 250 from 1998-99 to last year and the number of Hispanic students from 198 to 134 — has the highest admission standards of the three exam schools.
While few Americans seem to dispute that there is an “education gap” between American students and students in most other industrialized countries, there is a reluctance to accept that a) there is a similar gap within America between white and Asian students on one hand and black and Latino students on the other, and b) that that gap, in fact, makes up much of the gap between America and the rest of the industrialized world.
Instead, a lot of Americans prefer to pretend that there is simply an admissions gap, where blacks and Latinos are dramatically underrepresented at elite institutions because of some kind of mismeasurement of student ability.
