Gifted and Talented, or Left Behind: The Educational Inequality of Exam Schools

Advanced courses can determine the opportunities children see as they move from one educational institution to the next, which in turn determines their opportunities in the workforce.

But who gets access to these valuable resources?

Middle-class and wealthy children are far more likely to be recognized as “gifted and talented” from the day they set foot in a classroom. After all, these families have the resources to devote their children’s time to the cultivation of their skills, preparing them to pursue an advanced course load.

Working-class and poor families find themselves in dramatically different circumstances. These families struggle to pay rent and feed themselves, let alone earmark a significant portion of their money for non-essential activities or private tutors to cultivate their children’s personal growth. As such, their children are far less likely to be placed into a “gifted and talented” program from a young age.

Racial disparities play a similarly significant role in access to these programs. A 2016 study found that, even after controlling for standardized test scores, Black children were 54 percent less likely to be placed in gifted programs when attending schools with no Black teachers.

Given the clear inequality in exam school systems, why do they persist?

A Case Study in Educational Inequality

Boston’s education system is exceptionally well funded: Of the 100 most enrolled school systems in the United States in 2021, Boston allocates the most funding per student, at a whopping $31,397 per student. Yet even this institution exhibits stark educational inaccessibility.

Boston has three exam schools: Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science. Students at these schools receive significantly different educations than students at open-enrollment schools.

Gabriela M. Vasquez Rosado ’26, an alumni of Boston Latin School, said that inequality between Boston’s schools manifested itself in “things as simple as access to books that were newer” to as significant as “internship opportunities that were available exclusively to students at my school.”

In the classroom, Vasquez Rosado she said she had “access to certain classes, too, that were really great to broaden my perspectives but weren’t offered at other schools.”

Boston Latin School also sets its students up for greater postgraduate success, according to Vasquez Rosado.

“At my school we had so much help with the entirety of the college process from beginning to end in a way that was just not a thing at other high schools in Boston,” Vasquez Rosado said.

Vasquez Rosado said that these differences in quality of education were among the main reasons her parents wanted her to attend an exam school in the first place.

“They knew that my options were between an education with adequate resources and stuff like that, or go to a school in my own community, Roxbury, which just had a lot less resources,” she said.

Even within Boston’s three exam schools, there are striking inequalities.

At first glance, the three schools have similar monetary structures. Each of these schools receives funding from Boston Public Schools based on the number of students, student needs, and school programming needs. Since their students are far more likely to come from privileged backgrounds associated with less financial need, each of these exam schools receives less public funding per student than their open-enrollment counterparts.

The difference is Boston Latin School, Boston Public Schools’ premier institution, has its own school association dedicated to maintaining alumni relationships and raising funds for the school.

On its face, this might sound like a good thing — what could possibly be wrong with money coming from parent and alumni involvement?

Yet this additional funding allows Boston Latin to partially operate outside of the City of Boston’s equity-focused public funding structure. Boston Latin School had a total of $5,098,868 in revenue during the 2021-22 fiscal year. And that’s not even including the extra $1,575,284 given to restricted endowment funds.

There is no denying that the millions of dollars in annual support from the Boston Latin School Association contributes to inequality in Boston Public Schools. The distribution of private funding between Boston Latin School and every other school in the area is wildly uneven.

Vasquez Rosado expressed gratitude for her time at Boston Latin, emphasizing that she greatly benefited from the education it offered her. At the same time, she recognized the inequality in access to quality education surrounding enrollment at Boston Latin School.

“It creates inequality in Boston — it’s because of who is getting let in through the door and who is getting left behind,” she said.

Imagining an Education Beyond The Exam

Beyond Boston Latin School, systems of schooling designed by districts to dole out rewards to “gifted and talented” students have created a meaningful difference in opportunity.

Boston Latin Academy is one of Boston's most prestigious public schools, and one of three exam schools. By Andrew W.D. Aoyama

Even though Boston Latin Academy and the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science are not as immensely and insularly funded as Boston Latin School, they too are exam schools, serving the purpose of gatekeeping access to advanced courses.

We might be used to them, but exam schools aren’t the only way to approach access to advanced content — nor are they an equitable way to do so.

It is impossible to measure inherent intelligence through a test consisting of learned content; instead, exams measure content retention. As a result, they don’t truly find the “gifted and talented”; they find educational inequality. Worse yet, we use exam results to divide students into schools based on their previous access to educational opportunities — unjustly aggravating issues of educational accessibility.

Rather than telling students what they deserve solely on the basis of deeply flawed standardized tests that only measure prior academic experience, a school district might consider the truly radical idea of asking students and families. An equitable schooling system would divide students not by privilege, but instead by their individual academic needs.

In such a system, testing could still be a useful measure of content knowledge in specific subjects, but must be put in a broader context for class placement, paired with the consideration of prior teachers, students, and their families all together. Student placement must happen on a class-by-class basis; a student who struggles in math shouldn’t be barred from advanced art or science classes.

Given this approach, it doesn’t make sense to put all of the advanced courses in an entirely separate school. If advanced courses in any given subject are relegated to exam schools, the students attending open-enrollment schools effectively have a ceiling put on their education.

Fixing a Broken System

In an ideal world, to fight educational inequality, we would start at the root of the problem: racial and socioeconomic inequality. Unfortunately, if this country ever engages in a serious effort to combat these systemic issues, it likely won’t be because we suddenly realize the impact of educational inequality.

In lieu of eliminating the extreme inequality seen in the United States, local governments should take a deeper look at the challenges families face as a consequence of class inequality as they directly affect education. In practice, this looks like providing schools with better funding, afterschool programs, daycares, free meal programs, healthcare, and access to effective public transportation.

However, even the band-aid fixes for the symptoms of class inequality seem unlikely to be enacted in many locales. After all, policies like these, despite being necessary for children’s education, have faced significant conservative backlash.

American education is broken for many of the same reasons America is. But the existence of glaring inequalities, such as the exam school system, suggest a place to start patching it up. It’s simple: Children shouldn’t be either labeled as “gifted and talented,” or left behind.

Joseph W. Hernandez ’25, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Adams House. His column, “Boston: Education’s Capital City,” runs tri-weekly on Fridays.