There was a rally at San Francisco Unified School District headquarters in San Francisco on Tuesday to protest the new admissions policy at the elite Lowell High School.
The rally was made up mostly of parents. And instead of protesting the fact that there weren’t enough blacks or Hispanics at the school, the parents were urging the district to return to merit-based admissions.
The parents held up signs saying “Merit is not racist” and “Gifted and driven students need a place.” They were responding to the news that more students were given failing grades at Lowell than before the admissions change.
Of the 620 students in Lowell’s freshman class, 24.4% received at least one D or F grade during the fall semester, compared with 7.9% of first-year students in fall 2020 and 7.7% in fall 2019, according to internal San Francisco Unified School District figures obtained by The Chronicle.
In total, the number of Lowell ninth graders with a D or F grade tripled from 51 in fall 2020, the first full semester of remote learning, to 152 in 2021. The rise means the figures for that class at Lowell were closer to the numbers at other high schools in the city, district data shows.
The jump coincided with the first year that Lowell admitted its freshman class based primarily on a lottery — as almost all other city high schools do — instead of test scores and grades.
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Three San Francisco school board members were recalled largely as a reaction to the controversy over merit-based admissions vs. a lottery. But supporters of the lottery system point out that the pandemic skewed numbers for all schools and that Lowell’s lottery admissions were no worse than for other schools.
Despite the increase, Lowell was basically tied with Mission High School for the lowest percentage of ninth graders receiving at least one D or F grade in the fall among the seven public high schools with at least 200 freshman students, according to district data. Including students in all four grade levels, Lowell had the lowest percentage receiving a D or F last semester.
Pressured by the pandemic, the school board approved a fast-tracked switch from merit- to lottery-based admissions at Lowell starting this school year, citing COVID disruptions to the tests and grades that underpin applications to the school. Lowell’s freshman class this year was the most diverse in decades, with more Black and Latino students.
In truth, there is data to support both sides in this debate. Perhaps the issue of merit-based vs. lottery admission should be revisited after this school year when students have had a full year of non-pandemic learning under their belt.
But parents of high achieving students who didn’t win the lottery are steamed that some students made it through the lottery while their child was left behind. The pro-lottery side says all that’s needed for black and Hispanic kids to succeed is the “opportunity,” according to the NAACP president Amos Brown. “All they need is opportunity, the support services, and a welcoming atmosphere” to succeed, Brown said.
“Lowell High School is a public school. Scholars and scientists have proven that tests don’t always serve as indicators of the ability of a person,” Amos said.
Standardized tests and testing bias are entirely different issues. But grades are an excellent indication of achievement.
Counting every grade level at Lowell, the percentage of students receiving at least one D or F last fall rose to 12.3%, from 7.3% a year earlier. That uptick was 3.7% to 6.2% for Asian students; 21.9% to 38.7% for Hispanic students; 33.3% to 42.9% for Black students; and 10% to 17.1% for Filipino students. White students remained flat at 5.3%.
With those numbers, it doesn’t look like “support services, and a welcoming atmosphere” are going to help much.
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