SF's Lowell High School has already reversed its short-lived lottery admission policy, but the first graduating class from that era just graduated, with grades that were more or less close to the "merit-based" admissions students.

A good deal of the 2022 Recall the SF School Board animus was likely brought on by a decision to end merit-based admissions at Lowell High School the previous year, as the prestigious (but not very diverse) high school moved to have students admitted by lottery instead of test scores. That system lasted one more year, but was ultimately undone because alumni groups sued, many parents were livid, and London Breed’s appointees took over the school board after the recall.

Regardless, that first batch of freshmen admitted under the new lottery system just graduated this week. And the Chronicle has an assessment of their academic performance compared to previous graduating classes, which finds that the lottery kids did pretty much every bit as well, despite the stigma that they only got into Lowell because of lottery luck.  

“That title hung over us like an overdue assignment. ‘Not merit-based,’ they said. ‘Just lucky,’ they whispered,” Class of 2025 Lowell High graduation speaker Benjamin Zhang said in his speech, per the Chronicle. "Let this be our final act: To say that we are not defined by a lottery, a label or a transcript. We are defined by what we did with the chance we were given."

He’s not the only one who did quite well by Lowell standards. The Chron’s assessment of that first class of so-called “lottery kids” notes that they had an average GPA of 3.45, compared to the average GPA of 3.69 from the previous five years’ graduating classes. They also took an average of 2.65 Advanced Placement courses, whereas the previous five years’ students averaged 2.8 AP courses.

There was a little more difference in the SAT scores, which the lottery class averaged 78 points lower than their pre-lottery counterparts — and over 120 points lower than the class of 2022, which appears to have been a smart one. But the Class of 2025 still scored a full 240 points higher than the national average this year.

So, statistically, this is a very slight step down from the previous merit-based admissions classes. But you also have to factor in the role of the pandemic, and how these kids were entering high school just coming off a year-and-a-half of chaotic and haphazard distance learning.

There will still be another graduating class of lottery-era Lowell grads coming next year, though there may be little reason to assess their progress, because Lowell has already returned to the old merit-based system, and seems unlikely to try a lottery again in the near future.

Related: Post-Recall School Board Reinstates Lowell High’s Merit-Based Admissions [SFist]

Image: Lowell High School via Facebook

Image: Joe Kukura, SFist

You can call it “selective admissions” or you can call it “segregation,” but the school board voted 4-3 to reinstate merit-based admissions at Lowell, with all four Yes votes being London Breed appointees.

The on-again, off-again Lowell High School lottery-based admission process is off again. The Chronicle reports that the SF school board voted 4-3 Wednesday night to restore merit-based admissions at Lowell High School in 2023, generally considered the most prestigious high school in the city, though one known for a lack of diversity when the now-reinstated selective admission process was in effect.

And as the SF Standard points out, all four board members who voted to reinstate the merit-based system “were appointed by Mayor London Breed.” They were the three members Breed appointed in March to replace the recalled board members, plus president Jenny Lam, whom Breed appointed in 2019, but did win re-election to the seat in 2020.  

“I believe in an academic magnet school,” Lam is quoted by the Standard as saying. “I support, at this time, criteria-based admissions. Lowell as a school is not perfect on its own, and neither is its admissions process. I’m fully committed in ensuring we move forward as a district.”

In a dissenting vote to continue the lottery process, board vice president Kevine Boggess questioned why the district has a public school “that is considered superior to others.”

The new lottery-bases system absolutely increased diversity at Lowell, but also brought alumni lawsuits over lack of advance meeting notice. In voting to reinstate merit-based admissions, the board bucked its own superintendent's recommendation. Though that superintendent, Dr. Vincent Matthews, is retiring in six days.

So Lowell High admissions will go back to being based on grade point average and standardized test scores. According to KPIX, "The application window for Lowell will open in early October and close in mid-December."

Related: Lowell High Principal Suddenly Quits, as Post-Recall Drama Continues to Rock SFUSD [SFist]

Image via Facebook

After already suing the district over changes to Lowell’s merit-based admissions system, a group of Lowell High alumni are seeking a court injunction against attempts to diversify the prestigious high school’s student body.  

It’s fair to say that some of the Recall the SF School Board animus is because of a botched school renaming effort, while some of the sentiment is because of a bizarre $87 million lawsuit recently lodged (and tossed out) from board member Allison Collins. But do not underestimate the factor of the ending of merit-based admissions at Lowell High School, a move meant to diversify the student body at Lowell, but one that also enraged many Lowell parents to the point that they sued the school board in April in hopes of reinstating the former status quo.

Lowell High is probably the most prestigious high school in the San Francisco Unified School District, and also its least diverse, likely by an order of magnitude. As the Chronicle reported after the first lawsuit, Lowell’s student body at the time was more than 44% Asian, and less than 1.9% Black. (For comparison, the district’s students in general are 33% Asian and 7.8% Black) The board hoped to change this through lottery admissions, but as the Chronicle reports today, Lowell Alumni are seeking a court-ordered injunction so the change process cannot even start.

“Our suit aims to force the Board of Education to fully engage in a thoughtful and transparent public discussion regarding the best admissions policy for one of the nation’s most outstanding public high schools,” Lowell Alumni Association president Kate Lazarus said in a statement to the Chronicle. “The Board of Education promised exactly that type of open and inclusive process, but instead rushed through an admissions policy change with little opportunity for public notice or comment, much less any real input and analysis.”

When the school board changed the admissions process from merit-based to lottery last February, the Chronicle reported that the school board “circumvented its normal process to fast-track the Lowell decision, giving the public just one week to digest the proposal before a vote. Usually a policy change, especially a controversial one, would take at least two weeks and often much longer as it moved through committees.” Their new injunctions cites the Brown Act, which governs accessibility to government meetings, saying parents were deprived of their due process to comment.

We hate to reduce the Lowell saga to a racial conflict, but some element of that is certainly there. The injunction and lawsuit both name the Asian American Legal Foundation as plaintiffs, and meanwhile, anti-racism at the school in January was trolled with N-words and pornography. Lowell is probably San Francisco’s most prestigious public school, but somehow keeps managing to be its most controversial, too.

Related: Lowell High Rocked By Yet Another Wildly Racist Incident, This Time In an Online Class [SFist]

Image: Lowell High Alumni via Facebook

SFUSD is blaming hackers, but Black Lowell students believe it was their fellow students, as an online anti-racism class erupts in N-words and pornography.

The fashionable San Francisco antipathy toward Lowell High School has always been kind of a Meatballs/Caddyshack class warfare kind of thing, just a fun set of stereotypes that many natives foster towards the prestigious high school’s student body that is allegedly more bougie, privileged, or gilded. But things took a turn for the uglier in October, when a proposed lottery system, intended to temporarily replace the merit-based system due to a lack of pandemic-era testing while also making the school’s demographic more multicultural, turned a virtual school board meeting into a hotbed of racially charged attacks and social media posts with board members depicted with swastikas on their faces.

Three months later, things have taken a turn for the very-worse at one at one of California’s premier public schools. After the above tweet made the rounds and was picked up by the the district’s new supervisor Myrna Melgar, the Chronicle spoke to a Black Lowell student in response to racist and pornographic posts made in an anti-racism online course Wednesday.

The course, conducted over some ed-tech platform called Padlet, allowed students to post anonymously (maybe not a good idea?), and posts were then supposed to be screened by an adult moderator. Something clearly went wrong, as at least two pornographic images and five really rude n-word posts made it into the course feed. SFUSD’s initial response is that they suspect a hacking, though a Black senior at Lowell, Shavonne Hines-Foster, told the Chronicle, “This is Lowell behavior.”

The incriminating posts are online (WARNING: difficult stuff to look at in the screenshots at the bottom, beneath a students’ statement). But it’s also uplifting to see that many of the students did approach the exercise pretty thoughtfully, and the Black students who wrote the response really took the high road.

“We bring your attention to the lesson that was being taught: Anti-Racism,” the students wrote in an email to the district and Mayor Breed. “These actions were not committed in ignorance; they sought to perpetuate racism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy. If you choose to ignore this email, you are contributing to the same cycle. We cannot hide under our district’s progressive label. We must dismantle racism. Lowell and SFUSD have a history further marginalizing and ignoring Black students when issues like racism and discrimination are raised."

The above tweet from a Lowell teacher, who’s also the school’s Black Student Union co-adviser, alleges the incident was a hack and demands a hate crime investigation. The district is taking the same tack. “While we do not yet know who is responsible for this act, we do know that racism persists in our community and is harmful to everyone, especially our students of color,” superintendent Vincent Matthews said in a statement to the Chron. “We are committed to finding the perpetrators and ensuring full accountability for this heinous act.”

Race issues have long simmered at Lowell, whose student body is only 2% Black, and just 10% Latinx. Lowell put its admissions process overhaul on hold when October’s batch of ugly incidents popped up.  This is incident is so highly charged that it’s unlikely the district can delay their response until after COVID-19 blows over.

Related: Black Bird-Watcher Who Spoke Out About SF Racism a Decade Ago Celebrates Black Birders Week [SFist]

Image: Robin Y. via Yelp

So Newsweek's come out with its rankings of "the top public high schools in the country," and the Bay Area has 9 10 schools in the top 300: Magnet school Lowell High in SF topped the list at 57, and Monta Vista in Cupertino came in second (85). The rest of your schools: Mission San Jose in Fremont (140), Burlingame High School (196), Mountain View High School (213), Andrew P. Hill in San Jose (228), Mills High in Millbrae (234), Menlo-Atherton (252), and Berkeley High (284). [And Saratoga (180)! Thanks, commenter tinman, for pointing that out.]

We're not saying this ranking is perfect by any means -- many people are annoyed that the rankings are based solely on the percentage of students who take AP or IB tests. The rankers also carefully left out the "public elite" schools like Stuyvesant in New York from the calculation, on the theory that those schools are just too good to be included with the others. There's one Bay Area school on that list, the public charter school Pacific Collegiate in Santa Cruz.

Further adding to the Bay Area drama around the rankings, the Palo Alto school district simply refused to participate in the survey at all, saying that there was already too much emphasis on test scores at the expense of actual learning. Last year, Palo Alto's Gunn was ranked 79 (and Palo Alto High at 361).

Lowell, those crazy overachievers! Not only are they tops in the area in academics, they're also playing in the Bay Area high school baseball championship finals this week (best of 3 against Skyline, series is 1-0 with Skyline ahead.)

Well, look who's in imminent danger of violating the curfew for the kids under 13! Here's a picture of Gavin Newsom cutting a rug at District 4 candidate Doug Chan's kickoff event, first located by -- you got it -- commenter ThatChick!

Okay, here's the informative section: Doug Chan's running against Fiona Ma's aide Jaynry Mak for the District 4 seat (Fiona seems to be hedging her bets and has endorsed both of them.) Chan is known for his outspoken opposition to affirmative action programs that favor other minorities over Chinese-Americans (he opposed programs to increase diversity at the SF public magnet school Lowell High, but is okay with programs that help Chinese-Americans in business).

Most recently, Chan was named to the SF Police Commission in 2004 in a package with former PD Peter Keane, where the two of them subsequently were the only two votes against the firing of the police officer who broke a woman's arm in anti-war protests.

You know, we're kind of getting into the week-long series that the Chron's doing on the San Francisco school system. It's a comprehensive look at all the various factors affecting the perception of our local schools: segregation controversies; why people flee to the East Bay once their kids hit school age; how the school system is actually doing much better than everyone thinks it is; and how the lottery actually works. Tomorrow they're discussing private schools in the area, and then funding, and then (what we're definitely looking forward to), "the politics." Switchblades out, school board! (hey, whatever happened to Heather Hiles, anyways?)

The articles are chock-full of anecdotes, which we always like, and it's always a good exercise for us in the morning over our first cup of joe for the day to practice not judging people. We were particularly proud of ourselves today for not being harsh to the woman who said "no one loves San Francisco more than us" from San Diego because she thought Alvarado McKinley Elementary (with a 771 score; 800 being excellent) wasn't good enough for her child. Also, she wanted a bigger house. Her child is now at a school in San Diego that scored 948/1000.

We get that, sure, we're not judging. Well, maybe we're judging a little bit: we think maybe we love San Francisco more than she does (but we don't have kids). Anyways, it's been some good reading this week, and we're enjoying it.

Picture of Lowell High, the jewel of the SF public school system.