In February of 2021 the San Francisco school board ended merit-based admissions to Lowell High School, one of the top performing schools in the country. The school was criticized by the board for not being diverse enough, which in this case meant that 51% of the schools students were Asian. Alison Collins, a member of the school board, complained that meritocracy was a racist system and got in trouble for some old tweets suggesting Asian parents were using white supremacist thinking. The focus of the change to a lottery system was on creating more equity.

As you may remember, three members of the San Francisco school board, including Collins, were recalled. Anger over the change to admissions policies at Lowell was definitely a part of what motivated that outcome. By March of last year there were already signs that some of the students admitted under the new system were struggling. That was further confirmed last May.

San Francisco’s Lowell High School, regarded as one of the best in the nation, is seeing a record spike in Ds and Fs among its first batch of students admitted in fall 2021 through a new lottery system instead of its decades-long merit-based admissions.

Of the 620 first-year students admitted through the lottery, nearly one in four (24.4%) received at least one letter grade of D or F in the said semester, according to internal records obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle. This marks a triple increase from 7.9% in fall 2020 and 7.7% in fall 2019.

Jump forward to this week and a site that ranks schools nationwide did not include Lowell in the top 100.

In the public school category, no Bay Area schools made the top 20 nationwide, as determined by the school information website Niche, which bases its annual rankings on a number of criteria, including data from the U.S. Department of Education, standardized test scores, graduation rates, Advanced Placement enrollment, college admissions and survey results submitted by Niche users…

Missing from the top 100 was San Francisco’s Lowell High School, a competitive magnet school that’s been the center of controversy in recent years because of changes to its merit based admissions. The 166-year-old institution — the oldest public high school west of the Mississippi — ranked No. 143 in the country.

So far as I can tell, Niche doesn’t provide comparative data on schools from previous years. Instead they seem to just post the new data to the same site meaning that even old links published in previous years just go to the current data. But I did find this SFGATE story from February 2020 which mentioned Lowell’s previous rankings.

Lowell High, the largest high school on the list, often makes Niche’s top 100 list of the best public high schools in America, which they base on statistics, reviews, and other data from the U.S. Department of Education.

The new school board has voted to return to merit-based admissions last year but there were reports that change might be challenged in court.

After a nearly two-year battle, supporters of the merit-based admissions process celebrated Thursday, while opponents vowed to continue the fight to ensure entrance to Lowell remains a lottery-based process, as has been the case for the last two admission cycles. The school has become more diverse under the lottery.

“We’re considering all of our options,” said the Rev. Amos Brown, president of the San Francisco NAACP. “We’re not going to roll over and play dead. We’re going to fight this.”

So I think competitive admissions were back this year but I’m not sure if there is some ongoing lawsuit over this. Maybe Lowell’s ranking will climb again next year.