Lowell High School San Francisco: Encyclopedia II - Lowell High School San Francisco - Academics and Admissions

Lowell High School San Francisco - Academics and Admissions

Lowell High School San Francisco - Overview

Lowell is regarded by many as the best high school in the San Francisco Unified School District and offers students opportunities to build a strong academic background. The school's modular scheduling system and self-scheduling "arena" program allow students freedom in course choice. Students also have the chance to take a large number of Advanced Placement courses. The school's graduation rate is nearly 100%, and is the largest feeder school to the University of California system, in particular to the Berkeley and Davis campuses. Many students also matriculate at other prestigious universities nationwide.

Lowell High School is distinguished among the public schools of San Francisco as the only one using a competitive merit-based admissions process based on a point system which takes standardized test scores, GPA, a writing sample, and extracurricular activities into account. Lowell's academic success is due to the stringent requirements placed upon admission, and at present, Lowell High School is ranked 3rd in terms of test scores among the Top 10 Public Schools in California, behind Gretchen Whitney High School and Oxford High.

Lowell has been awarded the Blue Ribbon Academic Excellence Award three times [1].

Lowell High School San Francisco - Controversy

Many of San Francisco Unified School District's initiatives towards racial desegregation over the years have ignitied controversy, particularly at Lowell due to its highly selective academic admissions. This has resulted in outcry by parents whose children who may have been rejected by Lowell due to racial factors.

Beginning in 1983, the San Francisco Unified School District attempted to ensure racial desegregation at Lowell and other schools by instituting a race-based admissions policy as a result of San Francisco NAACP v. San Francisco Unified School District and the 1983 Consent Decree settlement.

As a result of the Consent Decree, SFUSD attempted to create a more equal distribution of race at Lowell, particularly attempting to introduce more African American and other minorities into Lowell's population. As a result of this policy, for the freshman class entering in 1985, Chinese American applicants needed to score a total of 65 points out of a possible total of 69, whereas Caucasian and other East Asian candidates only needed to score a 61 out of 69, while candidates from statistically "underrepresented" groups, including African Americans and Hispanics, were admitted with an even lower aggregate score.

Opponents of this admissions policy were particularly dismayed because the policy was strictly based on race--the policy did not take into account any candidate's socioeconomic background which had the arguably inequitable result of requiring some children from poor families to score higher than children from wealthy families. Many of these opponents felt that the strongest traditional argument in favor of differential admissions requirements based on race--i.e. to remedy past discrimination against members of the "underepresented" group(s)--was not applicable. Indeed, given the long history of discrimination against Chinese Americans in education and other contexts, the suggestion that the academic success of Chinese American candidates was somehow the result of historical legal inequities created by Chinese Americans that needed to be remedied with a preference for non-Chinese candidates appeared ironic at best, and arguably, grotesquely perverse.

Proponents of the old admissions policy, however, believed that preserving the school's traditional racial diversity -- a tradition almost a hundred years old -- was of utmost importance, not just for traditionally disadvantaged minority groups, but for Chinese American students as well, beacause the increased diversity enabled students of Chinese ethnicity to better assimilate and achieve success in life beyond the narrow racially ghettoized confines of Lowell High School. Proponents also point out that the majority of volunteer work and fundraising is done by the parents of Caucasian students, and the school would suffer were these parents' children to leave Lowell.

In 1994, a group of Chinese American community activists organized a lawsuit to challenge the 1983 Consent Decree race-based admissions policies used by SFUSD for its public schools.

In 1999, both parties agreed to a settlement which modified the 1983 Consent Decree to create a new "diversity index" system which substituted race as a factor for admissions for a variety of factors such as socioeconomic background, mother's educational level, academic achievement, language spoken at home, and English Learner Status.

In November 15th, 2005, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California denied a request to extend the expiration date of the Consent Decree, which was set to expire on December 31, 2005 after it had been extended once before to December 31, 2002. The ruling claimed "since the settlement of the Ho litigation [resulting in the institution of the "diversity index"], the consent decree has proven to be ineffective, if not counterproductive, in achieving diversity in San Francisco public schools" by making schools more racially segregated.

The expiration of the Consent Decree means that SFUSD's admissions policies, including the "diversity index" and the special admissions policies granted to Lowell, and many of its "Dream School" initiatives are no longer codified and mandated by the Consent Decree. As a result, these policies may be challenged at the community and local levels as well instead of just at the judicial level by filing a lawsuit.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Academics and Admissions", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki