"We might have gone lower within the pool for black and Latino students," Contompasis said, in response to critics who claim that with this set-aside policy, the bar was lowered for minorities, in turn diminishing Latin's long tradition of academic excellence. "But we never went below the top half. Actually, we never went below the 70th percentile. That's something people don't always know."

Initially, Contompasis said, the set-aside policy was meant to remain in effect for a cycle of six years (in the hopes that it would no longer be needed after that point). Instead, it lasted for more than 20 years until 1996, when Garrity, again the judge assigned to look at desegregation in theschools, ordered Boston Latin to admit Julia McLaughlin while her trial was pending. That fall, when Julia began as a ninth-grader, the school committee decided to abandon the 35 percent set-aside policy and again set up a task force, this time to look at alternative admissions systems that would allow the school to maintain its rigorous academic standards and retain minority students. Ideas tossed around included admitting students based on a lottery, residence, essays or socioeconomic factors. The task force included Susan Hughes '80, whose daughter Lauren was also denied admittance to Latin under the previous set-aside quota. Hughes remembers meeting for two months and that the outcome was "almost a self-defeating task."

The group created a 50/50 plan that "was difficult to explain to the public,"

says Hughes. Under the new plan, 50 percent of students were to be admitted based solely on merit using a combination of GPA and exam score. The second half would be admitted based on the percent of each racial group taking the test. If 30 percent of test takers were Latino, for instance, then 30 percent of the second half of those admitted would be Latino. "The problem," Hughes said, "is that the population of minorities taking the test was not representative of their population in the city." In 1996, for instance, out of the students taking the test, approximately 50 percent were white, 22 percent were black and 10 percent were Latino. In contrast, approximately 19 percent of the school-aged children living in Boston at the time were white, 48 percent black and 23 percent Latino.

This new 50/50 policy did not improve the number of minority students admitted and, as Hughes remembers, "played out almost identically to a 'straight-from-the-top' admissions policy." It was challenged the following year, represented again by McLaughlin, for his daughter's friend, Sarah Wessmann. An initial ruling in May 1998 by U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Tauro upheld the 50/50 plan, saying, "Diversity in the classroom is the most effective of all weapons challenging stereotypical preconceptions."

Six months later, however, a federal appeals court overturned Tauro's decision and ordered Wessmann admitted to Boston Latin, ruling that the school committee's definition of diversity was flawed, confusing "racial balancing" with "diversity." The court also said the committee had failed to prove that an admissions policy that used race as a factor was needed to combat lingering effects of past discrimination Ñ something Garrity had noted in his decision to let Julia McLaughlin into Latin two years earlier. The school Ñ discouraged by civil rights activists from appealing the case for fear that a loss at the Supreme Court level would jeopardize policies around the country - was forced to drop the 50/50 plan and instead admit students solely on merit: exam score and GPA. That admissions process is still in effect today.

Ongoing Discrimination?
Boston isn't the only public school system faced with changing laws. In the last few years, judges have ended similar desegregation orders in school systems across the country such as San Francisco, Nashville and Cleveland. As the debate about affirmative action - once centered on universities and professional schools - moves to the public high school level, three divisive issues remain in question: ongoing discrimination, the value of diversity and access. In regard to ongoing discrimination, legally the courts concluded in 1987 that the Boston school system had been deemed "unitary." The system was considered sufficiently integrated and therefore released from court supervision. As the Harvard Civil Rights Project points out in a 1999 report, "Resegregation in American Schools," when a court terminates a plan, it assumes that the historic discrimination has been cured. If a school system wants to maintain the plan, it must prove that considering race in admissions is a "compelling interest" for their basic educational goals.

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