Update: Lowell's lottery experiment
When I first published my article on the performance of Lowell’s lottery freshmen, I did not have the data to show that their performance was out of the ordinary for Lowell freshmen. The data is now available via internal SFUSD data obtained by the Chronicle. Carol Kocivar shared a chart with the same data here.
It has now been confirmed that Lowell’s lottery freshmen are earning D and F grades at about 3x the rate of previous Lowell freshman (24.4% compared with 7.9% in fall 2020 and 7.7% in fall 2019).
Departing Lowell Principal Joe Dominguez gave a hand-wavy dismissal, saying there were “too many variables” and citing “over a year of distance learning, half of our student body new to in-person instruction at the high school level and absences among students/staff for COVID” as possible explanations.
Does the evidence support these explanations? All SFUSD high schools experienced all of the conditions Dominguez cited, yet there was no similar rise in D/F grades earned by freshmen throughout SFUSD public schools. In fact, the Chronicle reported “The share of freshman grades that were a D or F in reading, math, science and social science classes declined citywide between fall 2019 and 2021.”
Maybe some will still argue that there is something special about Lowell High School that would result in Lowell freshmen performing much worse than in previous years due to the pandemic when this pattern is not seen in other SFUSD high schools. Luckily, we have a comparison class for that case too! There was no similar rise in D/F grades earned by Lowell freshmen during fall 2020: the first full semester of distance learning due to COVID-19. Yes, at Lowell, we have data on the performance of freshmen affected by more than a semester of distance learning, who had never experienced in-person high school. But their D/F rate was just .2% higher than the previous year’s — not three times as high (and probably not even statistically significant).
This makes a compelling case that the lottery (the only significant change between fall 2020 and fall 2021 that could affect the caliber of freshmen at Lowell) is responsible for admitting an unprecedented number of students who aren’t academically prepared to do well at Lowell High. Merit-based admissions should not be thought of as “elitist” — it’s merely a tool to make students aware of whether they would benefit from enrolling at Lowell based on their level of academic proficiency. The lottery did a poor job of providing that information, as shown by all available data. It’s time to go back to merit-based admissions — it’s unfortunate that another Lowell class will suffer the consequences of recalled school board members’ ill-conceived attempts to promote “diversity” over competence.