San Francisco's last good public high school voted to end their merit-based admission system in 2021 as part of the Great Awokening.
Lowell High School, which was previously overwhelmingly Asian and White, elected to switch to a lottery-based admissions system and became around 45% Hispanic and Black. The previously top-performing school saw grades swiftly collapse with 25% of freshmen students receiving either a D or an F in the fall 2021 semester, Legal Insurrection reported.
"This ultimately led to the ouster of three school board members," Legal Insurrection said. "The Asian community played a major role in the campaign."
San Francisco Unified School District's board of education last week voted to return the school to their previous merit-based system, KTVU reports:
The 4 to 3 vote will reinstate merit-based admissions for incoming freshmen at the esteemed academy in fall of 2023. The failure of the school district superintendent’s resolution to extend the lottery system means a return to applicants meeting a designated grade point average and standardized test score criteria for admission.
We previously reported, the district stopped the merit-based admissions for 9th graders during the COVID pandemic claiming there wasn’t adequate criteria to judge students because of distance learning.