“In Boston, as in many American cities, the top public school is an exam school. Acceptance into one of the three elite outfits here — Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science — assumes a different life trajectory for the talented middle schooler. An exam school education, the thinking goes, offers a more meaningful, rigorous education, opening the doors of elite universities and rewarding careers thereafter. Miss the cutoff for an exam school, and the fear is that you miss out on the life it promises. Such fear, however, appears to be misplaced. Two provocative new studies — the first to attempt to isolate the real effects of exam schools on their students — conclude that an exam school education in Boston or New York isn’t any better than the education that other public schools offer, especially for the kids most worried about getting in, whose scores hover near the admittance threshold. Those kids, one study found, end up performing about the same on their SATs whether they get into an exam school or not. And after high school, according to a study of exam schools in New York, exam-school students enroll and graduate from more or less the same universities as comparable students graduating from other public high schools. “Getting an exam-school education is no better than an alternative,” said Josh Angrist, a professor of economics at MIT and coauthor of one of the studies, “The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools,” published this summer by the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Neither Boston nor New York exam schools seem to boost achievement,” Angrist said.”
By Paul Kix