San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Excellence versus equity?
and siblings of current Lowell students.
San Francisco deserves better. The school board can easily retain academicbased admissions and make determinations on an applicant’s preCOVID19 semester grades from sixth grade and the first half of seventh grade, use other academic tests or some combination thereof.
School districts with academic high schools across the U. S. have convened parents, educators and civil rights/ community leaders to create temporary admissions plans in response to COVID19 that maximize academic excellence and equity. By contrast, our district has closed the door and is treating excellence and equity as contrary principles when, in truth, you cannot have one without the other.
In this time of COVID19 uncertainty, San Francisco families should not be pushed into this unpredictable and discredited lottery system that itself may impede diversity. If the school board insists on this path, it must provide the academic and other support for students to be happy and successful in their academic high school. Otherwise, the school board risks disrupting the futures of these students and giving other students and families more reason to leave public schools and San Francisco altogether.
Instead of eliminating academic standards, the school district — and all of us — should work to increase the number of students who can meet them. Schools define the character and future of a community. Please ask Mayor London Breed and all city officials to urge the superintendent to withdraw the lottery plan, retain academic admissions and consult parents, students and the community about future years.
John Trasviña, an attorney and longtime civil rights advocate, is president of the Lowell Alumni Association.
The dispute over admission to Lowell High School is based on a false premise that harms education for all students. The No. 1 predictor of academic achievement is family income, not grades or test scores. Families with means can afford tutors, camps and lessons to aid and support their children’s learning. Wealth translates into higher academic achievement. Which is why residential housing segregation has such a pernicious effect on lowincome children of color.
Firsttime immigrant groups come close in achievement levels, but over time they too lose out to wealthier students in schools that admit based on test scores. That is why the special schools in New York City are less representative of the neighborhoods they draw from than when they were first established. As long as a selection system is based on a test or academics alone, the results will be skewed to the wealthy and already privileged.
When you have one elite school in a system, you end up siphoning off many of the best students from the other schools and effectively lower the achievement levels of those schools. Look at what happened in Oakland. In 1959 Oakland built a new high school high on the ridge line and drew its boundaries so it included only wealthy neighborhoods there.
The result was that Oakland Tech, Oakland, Fremont and Castlemont high schools, which formerly had boundaries that went from the water line to the ridgeline ( which meant they all included bluecollar, middleincome and upperincome students in their populations) lost many of their best students to the newly opened Skyline High. The educational metrics at those schools began a long, streaky decline. The day Skyline High opened it was the best school in the district without having graduated a single student.
Black parents organized, and eventually the district began busing lowincome students from the flatlands to Skyline. But everyone already saw Skyline as the “best” school ( sound familiar?), so parents began finding ways around the attendance boundaries. Then the district changed the boundaries to include more students of color from middleclass areas for Skyline, stealing more achievers from the other four high schools. Parents outside the new boundaries strategized to get into the admission zone by hook or crook. ( I am not including McClymonds High, which early on was gerrymandered all Black in one of the poorest areas in the district and was not contiguous with Skyline’s boundaries.)
Sixty years later, Skyline remains the best comprehensive public high school in the district while Oakland, Fremont and Castlemont inexorably declined as they got fewer wealthy and academically prepared students and more lowincome immigrants and Englishlanguagelearning students. Only the gentrification of West Oakland saved Tech from being ranked a “bad” school.
The four nonSkyline high schools were good schools that sent lots of students of color on to top universities for decades — until the effects of Skyline siphoning off their top students scared many highachieving families to abandon them for private schools or charters.
Lowell has done the same. I grew up in the city. Once Washington and Lincoln were competitors academically with Lowell, and Balboa and Galileo weren’t far behind. No longer.
Parents don’t always know the inside baseball of education. They tend to react to best/ worst, top/ bottom scenarios. They see it as a loss for their children if they don’t get into the perceived “best” school. The district used to have several best schools. Who is served by having only one?
Steve O’Donoghue is a journalism educator who coordinates countywide student journalism programs in Contra Costa ( CCSPIN. net) and Sacramento ( SacramentoJournalismNetwork. net).