Controversy over the admissions process at San Francisco’s Lowell High School has opened a window for potential reform across all the city’s public high schools. The first signals, indicating what students, families, and staff want to see, are now public.
A school district task force created last year has released results, in two parts, of a survey that had broad participation from students, family members, and school employees. It included questions about the future of admissions at Lowell and Ruth Asawa School of the Arts (SOTA), the only other school that weights student performance for entry. (Lowell uses academic criteria, SOTA requires auditions.)
The consultant who ran the survey cautioned that the results, which leaned in favor of Lowell and SOTA’s merit-based admissions, are only one factor the 26-member task force will consider. It is also conducting student focus groups, analyzing student transcript data, and convening community “listening sessions.”
“While there’s a tendency to take one source of data and make that the narrative, we believe that deeper analysis is needed and we’re very excited by the ideas that the school teams have been surfacing through their analysis,” Matthew Kelemen, a principal consultant of Kelefors Education Partners, writes in an email to The Frisc.
The survey broached plenty of other topics, including admission policy for other high schools; college and career readiness; support or lack thereof in learning environments; and student perceptions of expectations that adults have for them.
The deep dive into SF public high schools comes amid many challenges facing the school district, including an enrollment decline, which affects state funding levels and risks school closures, teacher shortages intensified by pandemic burnout, low pay, a payroll fiasco, and persistent school segregation, according to an SF Chronicle analysis of the 2021–22 school year. (One bright spot: Enrollment was slightly higher for the current school year than expected.)
Kelemen is pleased with participation levels. Answers from 8,520 high school students were tabulated — 56 percent of the district’s total, the consultant says. The results will be one factor the task force considers when it makes recommendations to Superintendent Matt Wayne and his staff in September.
‘I want to make a path for students through the recommendations that come to me.’ — SFUSD Superintendent Matt Wayne at the Feb. 25 high school task force listening session
The district says early feedback has already prompted one change: More detailed information is coming soon about high schools and their course offerings.
Here are some of the survey results:
- Students, teachers, and parents at Lowell and SOTA strongly supported their schools’ selective admissions.
- A small majority of students and large majority of parents at other schools also supported merit admissions at Lowell and SOTA. However, staff at other schools were split — solid support for the status quo at SOTA, but less than 50 percent in favor of merit admissions at Lowell.
- The survey asked whether schools other than Lowell and SOTA should have selective admissions. One idea has been to create another Lowell-like campus in the city. The overwhelming answer was no. Only 11 percent of students, 30 percent of families and 34 percent of staff thought it was a good idea.
- For admissions, the survey broke down student support along ethnic, gender, and other lines, revealing a range of attitudes. Asian students, at 67 percent, were the most supportive of merit-based admissions at Lowell, with 39 percent of Black students in support. For SOTA, 79 percent of white students supported the current admission policy; Black students gave the lowest level of support at 53 percent.
The 26-member task force will also incorporate feedback from community listening sessions, which have drawn 87 people in three in-person sessions, according to Kelemen.
Last Saturday, at the last of the in-person sessions, 45 attendees gathered at Everett Middle School. The three-hour session was calm, with participants posting ideas on sticky notes, breaking into groups to talk, and enjoying free coffee and pastries. Wayne, the district superintendent, showed up to thank everyone for coming.
One theme that seems to be emerging, judging from Saturday’s session and the survey, is that students should have more opportunities to discover and pursue their passions. According to the survey’s summary of each high school’s focus group, slightly more than half of students and staff believe their schools effectively support students to do this, though the results look different across schools:
“Everyone is approaching the biggest issues in the district in different ways, but in the end, everybody wants our children to succeed and sometimes success looks differently,” Laticia Erving, a task force member and director of the district’s African American Achievement & Leadership Initiative, tells The Frisc. “Students want to say that they can go into any school, at any time, and it will be a place where their needs will be fostered.”
Back and forth on Lowell
The task force was created last June when the Board of Education narrowly voted to reinstate Lowell’s merit-based admissions, one of the city’s most acrimonious issues.
Previously, the board had shifted Lowell admissions to a lottery in early 2021, citing “pervasive systematic racism” and Lowell’s lack of diversity. A lawsuit charged that the decision violated state public meetings law, though; a local judge agreed and struck down the change. (The Lowell Alumni Association has reportedly begun gathering cash for more legal action if the school’s merit system is again dismantled.)
The February 2022 recall of three board members paved the way for a new alignment, with three replacements appointed by Mayor London Breed, to bring back Lowell’s merit system for the 2023–24 school year. Two of those replacements won full terms in last fall’s election, the third did not.
After the lottery system was put in place for the 2021–22 school year, Lowell had a more diverse freshman class than any time in at least 25 years. The class also received more D or F grades than previous freshmen classes, which fueled the admissions debate — made all the more complicated by the students’ learning loss during the pandemic.
While the task force is supposed to recommend a long-term policy for Lowell, the district is also struggling with student academic outcomes more generally, including significant disparities in achievement along racial and ethnic lines. The task force’s goal, then, is also to recommend solutions for underrepresented students and better prepare them for life in and after high school. Its final report is due this September, but the superintendent and board can give it more time.
“It’s not just about community input, because everybody has their own kind of special thing that they think is best,” says Rebecca Johnson, a Lowell history teacher and part of the task force’s Lowell subcommittee. “We need that, along with student input, and filter that feedback through some kind of verified and professional research, that shows how students learn in a multitude of different ways.”
The task force’s recommendations go first to the superintendent, who will incorporate his own recommendations. Whatever emerges from that process must go before the school board for consideration.
The Frisc asked several board members for comment about the task force, including the survey results, and received either no comment or a referral to a school district spokeswoman, who responded via email that the district is carefully reviewing the survey data, “which will inform the task force’s recommendations” to the superintendent.
The task force will have a public meeting on March 11 to examine and review the survey results, and it will hold a virtual listening session on March 15.
At the recent listening session, where Wayne thanked participants, his comments also gently underscored that the end of the process is a funnel. “I just really appreciate what you all are saying about coming together as a community to make all of our schools places where students can be successful,” he said. “I want to make a path for students through the recommendations that come to me.”
Gisselle Medina reports on education equity in Oakland and SF, and is pursuing a master’s degree at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.