Failures up at school after merit-based admissions ended

[Valin]

Hot Air

Jazz Shjaw

May 28 2022

Back in March, John wrote about the prospects for Lowell High School in San Francisco. The (formerly) elite school had traditionally maintained one of the highest graduation and college acceptance rates in the state. It was also one of the most racially diverse schools around, with more than half of the student body being of Asian descent. And then the San Francisco School Board decided that the merit-based system of admissions for the gifted and talented student programs was “racist” (?) and they adopted a lottery system for admissions.

So how did that work out? There were already worrisome signs in March, but the end of the school year brought news of how far the school’s performance had slipped. The number of students with at least one failing grade on their report cards jumped significantly. The parents noticed, and this week they showed up at the SFUSD offices to protest. (PJ Media)

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So 24.4% of the students – nearly a quarter of the entire student body – had at least one D or F on their report cards. That is literally more than triple the number of students with failing grades in 2019. The elite universities that used to scoop up Lowell graduates in large numbers aren’t going to be banging on as many doors this year with those sorts of results.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported without any apparent irony that these results indicate that “the figures for that class at Lowell were closer to the numbers at other high schools in the city.” Was that intended as some sort of defense of the change to the lottery system?

This is seemingly the ultimate goal of socialist “equality” efforts. They apparently can’t improve the rest of the schools to bring them up to Lowell’s level of performance, so they’ll just drag Lowell down until it’s as mediocre as the rest of them. But at least everyone will be equal, right?

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