The wrong plan

San Francisco school leaders are on the verge of a fateful — and damaging — decision to dump Lowell High School’s prized status as a nationally known academic institution in favor of random admissions based on a lottery. The plan would poorly serve students and send parents to the exits.

To be sure, the coronavirus pandemic has wrecked the grading and testing systems that Lowell relies on to screen freshman applicants. But this hapless substitute plan — an incoming class built largely on names pulled from a hat — doesn’t merit support.

The idea is sold as a oneyear fix, but that promise strains credulity. The elected school board hosts members who’ve never liked the idea of Lowell’s competitive measures, which they think unfair and discriminatory. As a result, in recent years more slots were reserved for students outside the usual admission channel. If the lottery idea takes hold, the pressure to level entrance requirements will surely increase.

Academic public schools exist across the country, and few if any are going the way Lowell might by dumping grades and going to a lottery. There is a range of substitute policies that could suffice, such as prior years of middle school grades and a focus on school activities, recommendations, and other criteria that might predict classroom success.

That task won’t be easy, but it beats the contrived idea of a quickfix lottery. It will also take parent buyin, a trust factor that’s in short supply after school leaders sprang the lottery plan on the eve of a threeday weekend. A parent and alumni petition opposing the plan is already rolling along, collecting names.

The city’s schools, shuttered since March, are limping along via distance learning and other patched-together teaching arrangements. It faces budget deficits in the tens of millions, and there is no definite date for students and teachers to return to the classroom. The last thing San Francisco public schools need is a divisive and poorly thought fight that would worsen the district’s image. Dropping Lowell’s standards is a bad idea at a disastrous time.