Admissions officers in higher ed know Lowell High School in California as one of the best public high schools in America, feeding the best colleges, public and private, Ivy, non-Ivy, UC, non-UC. Not any more.
For decades, the school had been San Francisco’s all-academic high school, with students from all over the city who needed the grades and the test scores to get in. Increasingly however, merit requirements created concerning racial gaps. Blacks were 6 percent of the students in the city, but only 2 percent of Lowell. Hispanics were 28 percent of the students in the city, and just 12 percent at Lowell.
Instead of trying to understand the reasons for the disparities, the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education took action last week, and decided to go to lottery admissions for the fall.
Done? Not by a longshot.
Instead of addressing the gaps from an educational standpoint, it leaves it all up to chance. A lottery? How is that better?
A kid could enter the lottery and still miss out. Maybe that’s no problem if the student wouldn’t have qualified on test scores.
But what of the smart kid who would have gotten in because he qualified on merit? What if he/she doesn’t get in? There’s your tragedy.
