Reply to Top SF high school sees record spike in failing grades after dropping merit-based admission system

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"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."

https://news.yahoo.com/top-sf-high-school-sees-192303605.html[/quote]

It looks as if the main point of this thread is Republicans trying to use one fairly obscure issue to try persuade Democrats and independents that some dumb fringe Democratic policies are worse than Trump and other Republicans trying to give control of the United States to Putin. Personally, I’d prefer a country with crappier test schools over one in which Putin puts the students in the test schools in filtration camps.

But the funny thing is that the numbers here suggest that switching to a slightly modified lottery system might work out.

These failure numbers are not actually that bad. They mean that, even after all of the unfairness of COVID-related lockdowns, most of the students who came in through the lottery passed most of their courses. The well-prepared kids might have an easier time ranking highly and doing well in college admissions. The lower-ranked students who are happy and get diplomas might come away with a much better education than they would have received otherwise and experiences that will change the course of their lives.

Some simple solutions for making the lottery system better, based on what European universities that face similar constraints do:

- Have the kids could complete the kind of short, simple assignment that they might do in the second week of classes, with phone access to a homework helper line, and get a grade back, to see how they like that, before they apply. Let them apply even if they fail, but require them to make a real effort to complete assignment. That way, they’re providing proof of seriousness, and they can gauge for themselves whether they can deal with the level of work.

- In a district that wants to provide equal access to opportunity but is open to some self-tracking: Provide discipline-based magnet schools as well as acceleration-based schools. Some of the kids applying to the academic magnets might know they’re not great students. They simply want to go to safe, orderly schools. Solution: Set up some schools that hold costs down by allowing a higher-than-normal average class size and apply tough disciplinary standards. Don’t let any kids who are hard to manage apply to these schools, unless they have an IEP that provides for, say, a minder that they share with two other students, and the minder can keep them on track. Let kids who want apply to the discipline magnets, as long as they turn in most assignments, even if they have bad grades. Use the money saved on the minder schools to give the schools with the remaining students more money. Chances are the money available in the discipline schools will go a lot farther, and the kids there might learn a lot more when freed from the unmanageable kids. And, this way, the academic acceleration schools won’t face pressure to save nice students with weak skills from hellhole schools. And the schools with hard-to-manage students can focus more on basic literacy, dealing with the kids’ issues, and arts and life skills issues, rather than struggling to pretend to teach algebra to kids who are weak on counting to 1,000.

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I live near SF and have friends with kids at Lowell. The actual stats are so much worse than this. The teachers were under enormous pressure to pass the lottery kids. They gave out Ds and Fs to kids who essentially cut class all the time only. Kids who showed up and barely out their names on paper would pass.

You should not celebrate this or assume this shows any sort of learning happened. It did not. [/quote]

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