The fact is if they're in a public school in an underserved area, they are most likely going to a disadvantaged public school, and face strong headwinds trying to achieve the kinds of scores kids in affluent neighborhoods get.

Note also that multiple factors are being looked at.

Generally when such systems are implemented the levels are not binary, e.g. housing project vs affluent suburb. My point was that for some bimodal neighborhoods using the neighborhood income average is not effective. Is there a national, annually updated list of neighborhood underserved-ness list?

This came up in Boston Public Schools. Admission to Boston Latin took into account the portion of a student body eligible for free lunch. It became mathematically impossible to be admitted to Latin if you weren't coming from a low income school.

I don't believe this is true, but if you have citations I'd be happy to hear them.

For instance, their accountability data [1] shows that, in 2023, out of 409 kids taking their ELA MCAS test, 92 were categorized as "low income."

I find this hard to square with your statement (all students came from low-income schools but 88% are not low income?).

1. https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/accountability/report/district...

A student attending a school without bonus points would need to score 97 points. Class rank is a factor which effectively imposes quotas on schools regardless of students grades and or test scores. Back around 2016 there were a handful of schools where students needed to score in excess of 100 points to get into Latin.

Last year 408 high income students received bonus points while 29 low income students did not. The admission rates for these groups were 85% and 55% respectively. [1]

[0] https://archive.is/20220203094548/https://www.bostonglobe.co... [1] https://archive.is/20231107020144/https://www.bostonglobe.co...