Lowell High School - this isn't over

At this point it is hard to imagine a clear, workable solution

The San Francisco School Board has done the nearly impossible.

They’ve made everyone unhappy.

Their vote last week to switch top-preforming Lowell High back to a merit-based enrollment system was surely meant to get things back to “normal.” It’s been almost two years of bitter infighting, accusations of racism, political upheaval and a thunderclap recall election that became (and still is) national news.

But we’re so far down this dark and winding road that who knows what normal even is any more? Switching back to merit enrollment now, after a lottery system was imposed during the pandemic, isn’t like to make anyone happy.

This little cultural hand grenade, was tossed into the board room by the extremely unpopular, seven-member school board. They voted in the lottery system after hearing that Lowell, which is over 50 percent Asian, was a hotbed of racism. That students of color were not only unrepresented — roughly two percent black — but subjected to racial abuse.

It is certainly a topic that needs examination. And so does the idea of “public” schools where you have to qualify to get in.

But that school board, which made tone deafness a defining feature, picked the absolute wrong time to take a stand on the purported sins of Lowell.

It was Oct. 2020, the pandemic was raging and parents were extremely frustrated that their kids had not gotten back to school quickly enough. The board was already taking fire for a ham-fisted and misguided attempt to remove names — famously Abraham Lincoln — from school in the name of political correctness.

In that fraught moment, the board surely knew that remaking Lowell — often cited as one of the top-preforming high schools in the country — would infuriate parents and Lowell Alums.

And in particular, it would aggravate the Asian community, who not only make up a majority of Lowell students (over 50 percent), but say they face their own racial issues. They’re the ones, they say, who are told to “go back to your country.” They get called racial slurs.

Why, they ask, are they included as supporting “white supremacy?” They’re a minority too. And by the way, a large chunk of Asian Lowell students — over 30 percent — lived below the poverty line before the lottery admissions.

And then those infamous Tweets from Board Vice President Alison Collins popped up. In them Collins mocked Asians for trading on the “model minority” trope, and accused them of playing the “house n——-” to get ahead.

At that point, to many Asian parents, the Lowell vote looked less like a call for racial diversity than an attempt to punish Asians for their success.

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We may well mark the recall as the last day San Francisco politicians underestimate the clout of an organized Asian vote. The recall was an off-year, low turnout election. All registered voters in the city received a mail-in ballot, but just 26 percent of them returned the ballot. However, of those requesting Chinese language ballots, 37 percent were returned.

You know the story. Three school board member were recalled by huge margins and Mayor London Breed appointed three new ones.

And last week, with the votes of the three-new members, the board restored merit enrollment to Lowell.

So we’re back where we were, right?

Not even close.

For starters, there’s a state law that specifically says schools must decide admissions with a “random, unbiased process.”

So expect law suits on that.

Then, let’s look at where we are now. The merit system doesn’t restart until fall of 2023, so we’re going to see at least two years of students who were admitted under the lottery system.

While that has increased the number of black and brown students, an excellent podcast by The New York Times “The Daily,” found that sometimes those students were called “the lottery kids,” or “the lotts.” One black student said racial relations were actually worse.

And then there’s the deeper dive on what we’re trying to accomplish here. Collins, among others, said the change at Lowell was needed to create and encourage racial diversity.

But a Chronicle study found that five other SFUSC high schools were more “racially isolated” than Lowell. Each had more than 60 percent of students of a “single race or ethnicity.”

And actually, two high schools, George Washington and Galileo, have an even higher percentage of Asian students than Lowell.

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And finally, Lowell gets the headlines, but is this really the defining issue of SFUSD?

Mission Local has done a great job of highlighting the terrifying conditions at Everett Middle School. Just last month a 13-year-old student was beaten so badly he was sent to the hospital.

Teachers and staff are so overwhelmed that they sent a letter to the district in March which says, in part: “We now find ourselves questioning our ability to even keep our students and staff safe during a school day and are writing to you in a desperate plea for help.”

Now that sounds like a San Francisco public school that could benefit from some intense public attention. And yet, Mission Local has reported, nothing seems to have changed.

And you know what that means.

Everybody’s angry.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cwnevius@gmail.com. Twitter: @cwnevius