10/21/2020
Ultra-wealthy, ultra-liberal San Francisco has strikingly bad public schools. I don’t mean “bad” in the usual sense of “infelicitous demographics” but in the sense of poor scores for most ethnic groups relative to their national norms. Now, its one good public high school, exam-using Lowell (the SF equivalent of NYC’s Stuyvesant and suburban DC’s Thomas Jefferson), is going to lottery admissions, perhaps permanently.
Despite backlash, San Francisco’s Lowell High will use lottery system next year
Katie Dowd
Oct. 21, 2020Lowell High School will admit students for the class of 2025 via random lottery, like most other public schools in the city.
In spite of controversy and backlash, San Francisco’s prestigious public school Lowell High will use the lottery system to admit students in 2021.
While most public schools in the city are subject to the lottery system, Lowell traditionally has not. The high school uses a combination of middle school GPA and state testing scores to evaluate most prospective students (some slots are set aside for students from under-served areas). But due to the chaos created by distance learning — and the fact that standardized testing couldn’t be done at all — the San Francisco Board of Education decided it wasn’t fair to evaluate students on metrics they could not meet in 2020.
On Tuesday night, the school board voted unanimously to switch Lowell’s admissions process to a random lottery. The change will only affect the class of 2025 right now, but the Chronicle reports there is some interest among school board members in making the change permanent.
As I’ve been mentioning, America is undergoing a disastrous Great Reset in which changes necessitated by lockdowns are combining with the triumph of Ibram X. Kendi’s anti-white racist ideology during the Summer of George to lead authorities to make institutional changes that are likely to become permanent, with long-run deleterious effects on the dysfunctionality of American civilization.
The Oct. 9 announcement sent immediate shock waves through the Lowell community, some of whom put together a petition to demand the school board reevaluate its proposal.
There’s no mention of demographics in the article. Not surprisingly, Lowell is only 18% white, 61% Asian, 8% mixed (mostly Eurasian), 10% Hispanic, and 2% black.
An interesting question is whether 2020 has seen whites splitting away from Asians on questions of meritocracy and coming to side with blacks because they feel it’s become hopeless trying to compete anymore with Asians on tests.
One test is November’s referendum in California, Proposition 16, on repealing 1996’s Proposition 209 that nominally banned affirmative action racial preferences in government actions. Polls suggest that voters are confused about the intent of the measure, since the pro-quota advocates tried to obfuscate its wording that they wanted to discriminate by race, which seldom polls well in the abstract. Also, I imagine a lot of voters aren’t aware that it’s in violation of the state’s constitution for government agencies in California, such as U. of California admissions, to discriminate by race because, obviously, they do (but just don’t tell anybody they are discriminating — it’s all very holistic, you see).
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