San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Lowell more diverse than other high schools, data shows
Earlier this month, hundreds of students across San Francisco received the news that they had won a seat at San Francisco’s academically elite Lowell High School. The freshmen were the second entering class chosen largely by lottery rather than by academic merit.
The renowned school has long had relatively few Black and Latino students among a disproportionately large Asian American enrollment. Yet an analysis of Lowell’s numbers shows that some other high schools in the district actually have less racial diversity — as do other academically elite public high schools across the country.
In coming months, the city’s school board, including three members appointed by the mayor after February’s recall election, will have to grapple with the question of Lowell’s admission system. For years, the school had used merit-based entry based on middle school grades, but during the pandemic that was suspended in favor of a lottery.
The switch was initially meant to be temporary — a response to the lack of test scores and inconsistent grading systems during the COVID crisis — but the school board eventually voted to make it permanent, arguing the old method was elitist and discriminated against underrepresented Black and Latino students.
Opponents of the decision sued and prevailed in court over a procedural error. They contend Lowell lures many families to remain in the public schools and offers high-achieving students, including many who are low income, an opportunity comparable to the best private schools in the country.
The battle continues. The board could decide again to make the lottery system per
manent, return to the previous selective approach or perhaps find a compromise aligned with state law, which generally prohibits admissions based on academic merit.
To inform the debate ahead, the Chronicle analyzed decades worth of student enrollment data from the California Department of Education. Starting from 1984, the earliest year for which data is available, we examined the racial makeup of Lowell’s student body and how it compares with the diversity at other district high schools.
Over the past four decades, Lowell has always had a plurality of students identified in the data as Asian. Since 1984, Asians made up about half or more of all students each year, with the highest at 70% in the 2002-2003 school year. But since reaching its peak in the early 2000s, the share of Asians has steadily declined and is now at its lowest in recent history, at 49%.
Non-Hispanic white students make up the second most represented major race group at Lowell, at 18%, followed by Hispanic students who compose 14%. Pacific Islanders make up 7%, those who identify as two or more races are 6%, and just 2% are Black.
Much of the demographic shift over the years coincided with times when the district made changes to its student assignment policy. For instance, between 1999 and 2001 — a period during which Asian enrollment in the district increased and the number of Hispanic students fell — SFUSD was devising a new student assignment policy after a 1999 court settlement prohibited the consideration of race and ethnicity when matching students to schools. In that period, the district did not use any demographic factors for student assignment and only considered whether a student requested to attend the school or lived nearby. By 2002, SFUSD had created a race-neutral assignment policy which considered non-race demographics, such as socioeconomic status or English proficiency, to ensure diverse schools. The data following this switch show a more diverse Lowell student body.
Still, Lowell’s student body is nearly 50% Asian this year, which is considerably higher than the district’s 30% average for all grade levels and 39% among SFUSD high schools.
The 2021-2022 school year’s Lowell freshmen were the first admitted by lottery in recent history. As a result, the class looks demographically different from those in prior years, when admissions were based on academic performance. Significantly more Hispanic students are enrolled this year than last — an increase of eight percentage points, from 13% to 21%. The share of Black students grew by two points, though they still make up only 4% of the 620-person freshman class.
White enrollment, on the other hand, fell from 21% to 16%, and is now below the share of Hispanic freshmen. The Asian share also decreased from 47% to 44%, though it was already declining over the past couple of years.
Critics of Lowell’s academic-based admissions contend that it leads to a less diverse school. But demographic data from 2021-2022 shows other SFUSD high schools are far less diverse than Lowell. Five of the district’s 14 high schools are considered racially isolated, with more than 60% of students of a single race or ethnicity. Lowell is not among the five — its largest race group, Asians, make up less than half of the student body.
What’s more, two other schools have larger shares of Asian students than Lowell. George Washington High School in the Richmond District and Galileo Academy of Science and Technology between the Marina and Russian Hill have 57% and 51% Asian enrollment, respectively, compared to Lowell’s 49%.
The five racially isolated high schools all have Hispanic majorities. At San Francisco International High School, two-thirds of the roughly 300 students are Hispanic. At June Jordan, another small school, 71% are Hispanic. The three other schools are Thurgood Marshall Academic High School, John O’Connell High School and Mission High School, each with more than 60% of students identifying as Hispanic.
At Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, an alternative high school with audition-based admissions, a third of the student body is white — far more than the 11% average across the 14 high schools. Lowell has the next highest share of white students, at 18%. We also compared
Lowell with other selective admissions schools across the country and found most are more racially segregated than Lowell. We analyzed data from the 2020-2021 school year — before Lowell’s admissions changes — at four schools where entrance is determined by placement testing and academic-based applications: Southern California’s Whitney High School in Cerritos (Los Angeles County), Oxford Academy in Anaheim, Stuyvesant High School in New York City and Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology near Washington, D.C.
In 2020-2021, Lowell had 57% of students identifying as Asian or Pacific Islander, 23 points higher than the SFUSD average of 34%. But at each of the other schools, more than 70% of students were Asian or Pacific Islander, a share significantly disproportionate from overall enrollment in the districts.
It’s a similar story when looking at the share of Hispanic students: only 12% of Lowell students were Hispanic, but that’s much higher than Thomas Jefferson’s 3% or Stuyvesant’s 4%. And while Lowell’s Hispanic share is 20 percentage points lower than the SFUSD average, it’s better than the 51-point gap between Oxford Academy’s percentage and its district average.
Still, the gap between Lowell’s Hispanic enrollment and the SFUSD average is sizable and has only worsened over the years. Back in the 1980s, this difference was just 6 percentage points. But between 1998 and 2002, the percentage of Hispanic students at Lowell fell dramatically, from 11% to 4%. Though Hispanic enrollment has grown since then, it still lags behind the district average. This year, Hispanic students make up 14% of all Lowell students, compared to 30% of SFUSD high schoolers and 33% of all district students.
Lowell also has very few Black students, equaling less than 2% of the student body, compared to 6% of all SFUSD high schoolers. Both percentages have decreased since 1984, when Black students represented 7% of Lowell enrollment and 17% of all high school students. Around the same time, San Francisco’s overall Black population fell from 11% of city residents in 1990 to just 5% in 2020 amid gentrification and suburban flight.
Tackling racial segregation at all San Francisco Unified’s schools has been a decades-long endeavor. In 2020-2021, more than a quarter of elementary schools were considered racially isolated, despite having a diverse district-wide population in which the most represented race group made up less than a third of students. In an effort to reduce the number of racially isolated schools, the school board adopted a new student assignment policy for kindergarten applicants starting in 2024. This policy, however, affects only elementary school admissions and does not include a plan for diversifying high schools.