Getting into San Francisco’s Lowell High School can feel like being admitted to an Ivy League university.
The prestigious high school’s notoriously selective admission process requires 8th graders to pass an entrance exam and earn the highest grade-point averages among their peers. It’s the only public school in San Francisco with a merit-based admission policy — one that’s been hotly debated since its implementation in 1966.
Last week, Superintendent Matt Wayne proposed to change the policy by basing admission on a student’s grade-point average, eliminating the required test and essay.
Wayne told The San Francisco Chronicle the shift would allow a more diverse group of students to attend Lowell, which is predominantly Asian and white. According to Niche, a nationwide school-ranking website, less than 2% of the student population is Black, and about 14% are Hispanic.
But the proposal is reigniting a divisive debate that began in 2020 — when the school pivoted to lottery admission — over who gets to attend the selective school and who is left out.
Supporters of the lottery said at the time of implementation that the system eliminated hard-to-reach standards for San Francisco youths. All schools in the districts except for Ruth Asawa School of the Arts and Lowell use a lottery.
Shurrin Zheng, president of the Chinese Parent Advisory Council, said that Chinese parents’ voices were not included when this proposal was crafted. She said the change was an oversight considering the school’s large Asian student population, which makes up more than half of the student body.
“(This proposal) strayed from (the demands of) our students, staff and community,” she said. “This action will hurt SFUSD enrollment tremendously like the lottery did.”
Some Lowell parents and alumni said students with lower GPAs might struggle at Lowell, or it could water down the high school’s high ranking and competitiveness on the national stage.
Zheng and others point to when Lowell shifted to a lottery admission system as proof: Teachers doled out more failing grades to students immediately after the lottery, and the school dropped from Niche’s top 100 schools in 2022.
The Board of Education restored merit-based admissions in fall 2023 in a divisive 4-3 vote.
Others believe the Lowell student body, with such a low percentage of Black and brown students, is not reflective of San Francisco demographics.
Virginia Marshall, Chairperson of the Education Committee for the San Francisco Branch NAACP, supported the lottery years ago and supports Wayne’s proposal now. She told The Examiner she would like to see the superintendent go a step further and implement a universal admission policy across all San Francisco schools.
“Lowell has made itself a sacred cow,” she said. “There is an idea that students who go there are better than everyone else. African American and Hispanic students who go there have a rough time because of (that mentality), and they should not.”
Lowell alumni are grappling with the proposal, and alumnus Laurance Lee said he has found the reception to be mostly negative.
Ex // Top Stories
San Francisco led the Bay Area in terms of growth between July 2022 and 2023, seeing a roughly 0.15% increase in residents calling The City home
Dean Preston launches effort to combat AI misinformation in local elections
The Department of Elections said it expects to certify the results of The City’s election within the next two weeks
“It is an incredible disappointment that Wayne is pushing forth this proposal,” he said. “(It is) cynically being pushed as a better way when it is clearly a lottery in disguise, a method that failed to make anyone happy in the prior experiment a few years ago.”
Lowell Alumni Association President Kate Lazarus said she was surprised by the announcement.
“It does not appear to be informed by any community input, academic research, or data review,” she said. “An overwhelming majority of San Franciscans do not want a return to the lottery, and this proposal flies in the face of public opinion.”
While a grade-point average to qualify has not been set in stone, Wayne floated the idea of a minimum 3.0 GPA in his interview with The Chronicle this week.
Marshall said that a 3.0 minimum is a perfectly reasonable standard for students, but students with this GPA are viewed as lesser at Lowell.
“If I walk into Lowell with a 3.0 grade point average, you’d look at me like I’m from Mars,” she said. “It shouldn’t be this way; I’m your neighbor all the same. There should be camaraderie among Lowell students.”
She added that camaraderie should be encouraged by school officials, and it is up to the teachers, administrators, and department heads to ensure students don’t get left behind. Extra support, in the form of tutoring or one-on-one attention, could go a long way, she said.
“If a student falls down, the principal, the teachers, should immediately be there to help them up,” she said.
But Lowell alumnus and former University of San Francisco School of Law dean John Trasvina said those resources aren’t available. “I haven’t heard a lot of extra resources around at any school to do any of that,” he said.
Trasvina said the issue is less about lowering the standard to get in and more about investing in San Francisco middle schools so all 8th graders have a fair shot at getting into a prestigious high school.
“We have a crisis when less than half the students graduating from 8th grade are considered ‘high school ready’ by the school district,” he said. “School officials should prioritize improving educational opportunities for students at all the middle schools so they can succeed at all the high schools.”
The Board of Education will discuss the proposal next week and will vote on an admission policy at a later date. The Friends of Lowell Foundation, a nonprofit organization of Lowell alumni, has already announced preparations to file a lawsuit if the proposal passes.
Wayne said the proposal is not about making people happy.
“It’s about doing what we think is right for the kids and then right for our whole portfolio,” he said.
