Anyone who applies to a Boston exam school must know something about inequality.

A member of Boston Latin’s Class of 1981, Ron Bell assumed he had been among the Black students admitted with the help of racial set-asides ordered by a federal court. It took another forty years, after the set-asides had been overturned, before Bell learned from his former headmaster that he had gotten one of the highest scores on the qualifying exam.

For that, Bell thanks Mr. Lee, his teacher in the more advanced sixth grade at the Thomas Edison School in Brighton. “This guy gave us more work,” said Bell. “I mean it. It was like he had us for Latin—because, when I went to Latin, I was like, ‘This is like Mr. Lee.”

Bell grew up a few blocks from Boston Latin, in Roxbury’s Mission Hill neighborhood. His father worked two jobs and his mother was a bus monitor who later worked at Northeastern University, in a job that helped pay the cost of college for two daughters. But Mr. Lee was an authority who commanded respect.

“It was almost like listening to a drill sergeant, and also a Black male figure,” said Bell. “It showed me an image, and I responded well to that.”

•••
In Boston, responding well and going to one of its three exam schools is to beat the odds. As I prepare to mark the 50th anniversary of my class at Boston Latin—delayed one year by the pandemic—the number of those choice options remains unchanged. Some students who fail to make the cut have other options that allow them to succeed, but the exam school mystique is only heightened by a rationing of opportunity that forces many other capable students to settle for less. And in Boston’s public high schools, at least 21% fail to finish in four years.

At its best, the steep gradient of opportunity has inspired exam school alumni to pursue a public mission, a feature dating back to 1635, when Boston Latin was founded. While extending British dominance over indigenous land, the founders wanted to groom champions of Puritan religious orthodoxy. That meant expanding literacy for study of the English Bible, but also exposure to the secular poetry and republican oratory of ancient Rome and Greece. The school’s earliest notables included theologians, but there were also other kinds of leaders with other agendas, including five signers of the Declaration of Independence and, eventually, two of Boston’s newest office holders, state Rep. Brandy Fluker Oakley and City Councilor At-Large Ruthzee Louijeune.

If anything, the built-in conflict over the mission of a public exam schools has become more intense, driven by demands for competitiveness with inclusion and fierce debate over the meaning of merit. Grades can be inflated, while a qualifying exam can be skewed by race or how much it aligns with earlier curricula. An index of individual talent might also reflect more test preparation and tutoring, or placement in advanced work classes—factors that have loomed larger in recent years.

But, if an admissions process can be a barrier separating winners and losers, the schools themselves can also be thought of as the sum of their students as they interact with each other and the outside world.

Boston Latin School students are shown in the school’s Black Box theatre during the annual Moth Story Day in which students and faculty present 10-minute stories in a day-long series of sessions. Boston Latin’s second cohort of Topol fellows initiated the Moth Story Day in 2018 to share their personal stories with the community as a whole.  Photo courtesy Rachel Skerritt

•••
Even before applying to Girls’ Latin, Suzanne Lee had a lesson about the difference between sorting and ability. Arriving from Guangdong Province in China when she was 11 years old, she lived with her parents in Grove Hall, where her family had moved after being displaced from Boston’s Chinatown. Just before she arrived, Lee had been a sixth-grade student. At the William Lloyd Garrison School, she was back in grade four, sitting at the front of the classroom and struggling to improve her English. It was her sixth-grade teacher who noticed her strong math skills and encouraged her to take the entrance exam.

•••
The outgoing Head of School at Boston Latin, Rachel Skerritt, took her exam after being placed in an advanced work class based on her third-grade test scores. She had an older cousin who graduated from Boston Latin in 1987, but her mother, who came to the United States from Antigua as a middle-schooler, had had a different experience. She was placed on the non-college track at Jeremiah Burke High School, graduating in 1965, when fellow students included the future recording star and “Disco Queen” who would be known as Donna Summer.

In that same year, I was a sixth grader in Hyde Park and attending a Catholic school, like more than one-quarter of my class at Boston Latin. Exam schools were not on my mind when Sister Gerard Maria suspended our daily routine for long, tiring math drills. The material wasn’t new, but the pace was almost frantic. It was around this time that she took me aside in the hallway and told me to take the test. Out of fifty students in the class, three were accepted, less than half the number at each of the two parish schools in West Roxbury. If nothing else, the math drills signaled there was no single measure of academic merit.

Our pressure to compete was tempered by messages about equality and tolerance. But our world was also configured in the weekly children’s Mass, where students from our school were sorted by gender and grade level, with students from public schools in the pews farther back.

On Fridays, we got out early for “release time,” making way for public school students to get religious instruction. Looking out from our classroom on one of those Fridays, I could see them extend in a squirming column, waiting their turn out on the sidewalk. To most people, they would have looked just like us. When Sister Gerard Maria saw them, she paused for a moment. In a voice that seemed abstracted, and maybe less to us than to herself, she said, “Those public-school kids, they even smell different.”

While I was in grade six at a three-year-old building, Jonathan Kozol was teaching a predominantly Black student body at an overcrowded school in the Mount Bowdoin section of Dorchester. In “Death at an Early Age,” he described how students were harmed by building conditions, outdated materials, and educators who treated them, not as potential leaders, but with “standardized condescension.” Where Kozol saw racial inequality in education, Boston School Committee members saw inequalities in people or in circumstances beyond the control of educators.

That same year, the Boston NAACP filed a federal lawsuit against the Boston School Committee, alleging racial segregation. That was the issue two days later, when Martin Luther King, Jr. led a march from Roxbury to Boston Common. From there, he went up Beacon Hill to address state legislators, calling de facto segregation in the north “a new form of slavery.”
•••
Boston’s exam schools can boast of students who go on to become leaders, but their sense of public mission might not emerge until years after graduation. For Suzanne Lee, that process began after she went from Girls’ Latin to Brandeis University.

“I remember in college that I felt like I knew how to study, but that’s about it,” said Lee. “I didn’t have any other skill, like discussing about current events, or how to think about something. The critical thinking wasn’t there.”

But going to student meetings at Brandeis led to her being recruited as an English teacher in Chinatown for recent immigrants, as Lee described them, “mostly common workers, like my mother’s friends.” She later went on to become the principal at two Boston public schools. The most recent, until 2009, was the Josiah Quincy Elementary School in Chinatown, with large numbers of English Language Learners and special education students.

•••
At Boston Latin, Bell played basketball and football, along with three different brass instruments. His leadership moment came a few years after graduation from college, in 1989, with the Stuart case. Stuart’s accusation that a Black man had shot him and his wife in the Mission Hill neighborhood would be revealed as a hoax more than two months later. But the immediate aftermath of the shooting was the widespread and aggressive racial profiling in a blitz of stop-and-search by Boston Police.

At the time, Bell was an administrator with the community center in Mission Hill and the Boston Neighborhood Basketball League. He decided to channel the community outrage over police tactics into political action. He tried registering voters at store fronts but got little response. Then he organized a basketball tournament with voter registration and other information tailored for Black men and boys. The response to “Dunk the Vote” led to more registration efforts and political campaign work.

Bell said the drive also required him to face his own discomfort and unfamiliarity with the voting process, an effort that drew on his exam school background.

“It helped me be bold enough to ask a question,” he said. “Some people are afraid to ask questions.”

•••
Before majoring in English at the University of Pennsylvania, Skerritt had been a seventh grader putting off a reading assignment. By tenth grade, she was in Honors English. More importantly, Skerritt said, she had a teacher “who really pushed me, who was really tough on me in a very loving way and insisted that I rise to a level of excellence and not necessarily ride on my naturally good English talents.”

Skerritt’s favorite book from the class was the novel by Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” She later came back to her school, at first as an English teacher, and she still knew the book’s opening by heart, starting with “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”

I didn’t read the book until early 2005, when I was captivated by the opening sentences. The disastrous hurricane near the end seemed somewhat contrived – that is, until a few months later, when New Orleans was overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina and the terribly inadequate response from the federal government.

Among those responding to Katrina from afar was Ron Bell, helping with relocation in the Boston area for 21 displaced families. That led to an offer of help from another Boston Latin graduate, the late Sidney Topol. A Dorchester native, Topol went on to become well known as a communications innovator, philanthropist, and active supporter of the Democratic Party.

Topol and Bell also worked together in 2005 on a march from Roxbury to the State House, retracing the steps in the march led by King forty years earlier. If the march was a reminder of persistent inequality in education, Bell and Topol were one more example of a school tie, connecting people of different backgrounds and generations.

Because of her musical activities at Boston Latin, Skerritt found herself performing with a school choir at an alumni dinner, then sitting at a table next to Raytheon’s chairman and CEO, Thomas L. Phillips, which led to her receiving a scholarship of $5,000 a year. And that led to more encounters at alumni events, even after Phillips had retired in 1991.

Because of experiences like that, said Skerritt, going to Boston Latin “absolutely changed the trajectory of my life, both in terms of what it exposed me to from an academic perspective, but also the network that you become a part of.”

As Bell put it: “It’s not just what you know, but who you know.”

But Skerritt also emphasized the value of connections among students themselves. “A school of 2,400 kids across all socioeconomic ranges, speaking close to 50 languages, just different religions, different relationships with Boston,” she said. “It’s hard to get that in schools that might have similar academic outcomes.”

•••
When I was a seventh grader, my classmates and teachers were less diverse, but our headmaster, Wilfred O’Leary, dubbed us the “aristocracy of the intellect.” That reinforced the barrier of elitism, but it could have also meant that excellence wasn’t always determined by genes. If we could feel flattered, we could eventually dare to snicker when a student, hearing the master’s voice on a new P.A. system, dubbed him as “The Wiz.”

Because Boston Latin was surrounded by places of learning and culture, we crossed paths with college students five days a week. A short trolley ride after school would take me to the library in Copley Square, where I could be one of the figures arched under the green lampshades and vaulted ceiling of Bates Hall. Once I left, another trolley ride would let me blend in with people heading back from work. I was an adolescent impersonating a grownup.

•••
Suzanne Lee compared the environment of Girls’ Latin to a “cocoon,” with its fabric of conversation—wishful or promotional--about students getting into prestigious schools.

“You’re surrounded with that kind of talk all the time, not just from teachers, but from other kids, too,” Lee recalled. “And then,” she added, “you always look at that list when they publish who got into what school, and it’s never about who didn’t get in.”

By the time she was the principal at the Quincy Elementary School, Lee was asking teachers to pay more attention to students who were struggling.

That’s also a strategy built on by Skerritt at Boston Latin. Unlike in the past, when educators took pride in a high rate of failures, Skerritt boasts about a high rate of students who remain and graduate. She talks about support for learning and mental health needs, and platforms for students’ cultures, but she admits that workload tolerance remains a struggle.
“I also think that Latin schools—or exam schools,” she said, “shouldn’t be the only option if families just want a rigorous and safe and positive experience.”

As an educator, Lee said, she felt it was her job to prepare students for whatever qualifying exam was required, despite reservations about its fairness. Though she agrees with the need for some kind of “gateway” for admission, she acknowledged that still leaves students at the mercy of circumstances.

“As you think historically about the role that race plays in public schools,” said Lee, “that if the only way you get [into an exam school] is some teacher recommending you or pushing you, that’s a story, too.”

With her own grooming for exam school in advanced classes, Skerrit acknowledged that “pathways feel like they have to be really precise to end up in the place where many want to go, and it shouldn’t have to be that precise.”

And Ron Bell says educators like Mr. Lee are in short supply. “I think that’s one of the major issues,” he said, “not having a lot of Black male role models.”

•••
After my graduation in 1971, the two Latin Schools became coeducational. That was the first in a series of policy changes that would have altered my odds of admission, maybe placing me on the other side of a gateway. As things were in 1965, I had two older brothers already in college, along with aunts and uncles who were helped through college by the GI Bill. At home, there were a couple of small shelves with books, some better than others, but all within reach. I had my own room with my own desk. Distractions were easily tuned out.

It would take almost twenty more years to realize that another thing I took for granted – riding the trolley – was a luxury that Ray Bolger couldn’t afford while he was growing up more than one century ago in Dorchester. I managed to interview him because my student years led to being a substitute teacher in Boston, and then to working in Dorchester on a weekly newspaper.

Bolger was acclaimed for dance roles on Broadway and best known as the Scarecrow in the 1939 film version of the “Wizard of Oz”—the same role highlighted in the 1978 film, “The Wiz,” by Michael Jackson’s number, “You Can’t Win.” In the older version, Bolger was the tattered, almost gracefully disjointed figure without credentials, dehumanized yet wanting to pass for human:

With the thoughts that you’ll be thinkin’
You could be another Lincoln
If you only had a brain.

We met as two people equalized by connections with Dorchester and, thanks to free music lessons at Boston Latin, I could even boast of having, like Bolger, performed at the Strand Theatre. What I didn’t realize, until he brought it up, was how much he wanted to me to know his grades at the Oliver Wendell Homes Elementary School were good enough for getting into Boston Latin. Since there was no qualifying exam at the time, he explained, the only admissions barrier was that his parents didn’t have enough money for his carfare.

When I showed up for the interview and Bolger opened the door to his hotel room, I saw the rags and straw had morphed into something else: a traveling entertainer between acts, dressed in a smoking jacket. But he was still playing his cherished character and bold enough to ask the first question: “Did you go to Boston Latin?”

Chris Lovett is the former news director of BNN-TV’s Neighborhood Network News and a longtime community journalist with a particular focus on Dorchester. He is a regular contributor to the Dorchester Reporter.