One thing that the Boston Globe article did not mention about the valedictorians from the Boston Public Schools that weren’t exam schools - what were their SATs? If the kids who are doing very well academically mostly leave to go to the exam schools, or get scholarships to prep schools and other private schools, or go to suburban schools via Metco, then you’re left with the lower achieving kids in the plain vanilla Boston public high schools. I wouldn’t be surprised if those valedictorians had SATs far, far below the average of the schools that they were admitted to, and given free rides to. Even kids with high SATs, who came out of highly competitive high schools, often struggle with the transition to college.
And becoming a parent while in college is almost always going to keep you from graduating. Likewise, having a mental health crisis.
Being admitted to a school that you’re not qualified for is a recipe for disaster. I’ll never forget a young AA man with whom I worked in a medical library before I went to medical school. He had gone to a very low-level, non-competitive college in the early 1980s - I think it was West Chester, which back then anyone could get into. From there, he got into Penn Med - one of the most competitive med schools in the country. I bet that Penn had never taken anyone from West Chester. But he just didn’t have the innate ability to get through. The school gave him a lot of extra tutoring, let him repeat years, but after 4 years he had not been able to complete the first two years. He then got hired by the medical library I was working for. The top job in the underpaid intellectual basement sweat shop there was reading medical journals and abstracting and indexing them for drug companies. Most of the people doing it were women with BAs or MAs in science fields. He had a BA in a science field, and had had four years trying to get through the first two years at Penn Med, and yet he could not be trained to do that job - he just did not have the innate ability to understand a medical journal article, summarize it, and write down the most important topics covered in it. So they had him be a screener - his job was to screen articles for certain key words, and then send them to the abstractors to be analysed. He was the nicest guy, and he probably would have made a good physician - not a great one, but good enough. If he had gone to a low level med school, he probably would have gotten through. Being admitted to Penn Med was the worst thing that could have happened to him. He wasted four years, probably incurred a lot of debt, and didn’t wind up with an MD.
Just because you’re the valedictorian in a noncompetitive high school, doesn’t mean you have the innate ability to succeed at a highly competitive university. I’m not saying that that applies to every one of those kids - they should be proud that they did the work to become valedictorians. But their inability to succeed in highly competitive college settings isn’t necessarily a reflection of BPS schools. Most of the kids admitted to highly competitive colleges have top grades, a string of 5s on AP exams, and 99th % SATs. These valedictorians surely didn’t have those AP and SAT grades, so how could you expect them to achieve at a college where 99th% achievement was the norm? And with most of the high achieving kids going to other schools, including BPS exam schools which DO provide a level of education that prepares kids for the most competitive universities, BPS public schools’ top classes were being run to meet the level of the kids in those classes. They had AP classes - but they had to go more slowly through the material, at the level and speed that the kids could absorb. What else could they do? Their mission is to teach the kids who are there in those schools, and that’s as fast as those kids could learn college level material.
It’s not necessarily the BPS school system that failed those valedictorians. Life isn’t fair. Not everyone is born with the same abilities as everyone else. There are some steps that BPS could take to make sure that all kids who are able, are identified early for prep programs to get into the exam schools - and they’re already taking some of them. But even if every child who is able to perform at the highest academic level is identified and steered into more challenging programs, that won’t change the fact that the top student at the regular BPS high school is not able to achieve at the most competitive colleges - in fact, it will make it less likely.