On November 24, 2025, the Legal Defense Fund, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-AAJC filed a motion to intervene in Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence v. Boston School Committee on behalf of two community organizations who represent Black, Latinx, and Asian American families in Boston: Boston Education Justice Alliance (BEJA) and Asian Pacific Islanders Civic Action Network (APIs CAN).
In their motion to intervene, the multi-racial coalition seeks to defend the Boston School Committee’s right to adopt admissions policies that ensure that every student has an equal opportunity to compete for admission to Boston’s three selective Exam Schools.
For decades, many students of color in the Boston area were unnecessarily denied access to Boston’s three selective public high schools (Exam Schools). The schools, which include Boston Latin Academy, Boston Latin School, and the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, used a standardized test to admit students that denied many candidates an equal opportunity for admission. That test covered topics substantially different from the curriculum taught in the Boston Public Schools (BPS) system and led to many parents seeking costly out-of-school tutoring to gain admission. The developers of the test warned BPS that the test might not accurately predict the performance of students of color in the Exam Schools, and that BPS was using test scores in a way that was inconsistent with the developers’ guidelines.
This prior admissions process sorely underidentified talented and well-qualified Black students and other students of color. For example, according to a report from a group of civil rights organizations, Black student enrollment at Boston Latin School in 2017 was at its lowest rate since desegregation began in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. And in March 2020, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education reported that reliance on the test resulted in the unfair exclusion of many qualified Black and Latinx students from the schools.
With the goal of making selective schools available to all talented students in Boston, and in response to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Boston School Committee adopted an interim admissions plan for the 2021-2022 academic school year that eliminated reliance on standardized test scores and admitted students based on their grade point averages (GPAs), allocating 20 percent of seats to students with the top GPAs citywide and 80 percent of seats to students with the highest GPAs in each of the city’s 29 zip codes.
Four months after the adoption of the interim plan for the 2021-2022 school year, the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence — a group of white and Asian American parents and students represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation — filed a lawsuit against the Boston School Committee, its members, and the BPS Superintendent, claiming the change in policy was discriminatory against white and Asian American students and violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The First Circuit upheld the admissions policy as lawful. In June 2024, the Boston Parent Coalition petitioned the Supreme Court to examine the new admissions policy. On December 9, 2024, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Since then, the Exam Schools have used an admissions process that considers applicants’ academic performance in the context of their socioeconomic status. Applicants are assigned to a tier based on their home address. Tiers are based on five socioeconomic characteristics, and students only compete with other students in their tier for admission to the Exam Schools. Each tier contains roughly the same number of students as other tiers. In addition, each tier is allocated approximately the same number of seats. Invitations are awarded through multiple cycles, with the lowest socioeconomic tier going first in each round.
On July 17, 2025, the Boston Parent Coalition filed another lawsuit challenging the tier-based admissions plan. The Boston Parent Coalition alleged that the system discriminates against white and Asian students in violation of the U.S. Constitution and the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
On November 5, 2025, the Committee approved a new policy for the 2026-2027 school year, which allocates seats at the Exam Schools for the top 20 percent of applicants citywide based on their GPA and standardized test scores, without consideration of socioeconomic status. The new policy allocates the remaining 80 percent of seats to the highest scorers in each of four socioeconomic tiers. This policy is a rollback from the earlier tier-based systems that allocated all seats based on a student’s socioeconomic tier. The School Committee approved this new policy over the objection of multiple individuals and community groups, including BEJA, who argued this new policy partially re-erected unfair barriers to admission.
The Legal Defense Fund, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-AAJC filed a motion to intervene in Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence v. Boston School Committee on November 24, 2025.
