San Francisco’s elite Lowell High School will admit students by lottery — not grades and test scores — this year, under a proposal to be decided Oct. 20.

The school board says admitting the top students is too difficult this year, because spring grades were pass-fail and state tests were canceled. But parents fear Lowell, under fire for years because few Latino and Black students qualify, will become just another high school.

At a chaotic virtual school board meeting, board member Alison Collins, apparently thinking she was muted, said “I’m listening to a bunch of racists.”

If the plan is adopted, “siblings of current students would get top priority,” writes Jill Tucker for the San Francisco Chronicle.  Next will come students from a mostly black middle school, which got special status in 2018, and those from low-scoring census tracts. Remaining seats would be assigned randomly.

Sixty-one percent of Lowell students are Asian American, 18 percent white, 11 percent Hispanic, 8 percent multiracial and 2 percent black. That compares to district enrollment of 29.4 percent Asian American, 14.5 percent white, 32.4 percent Hispanic, 5.9 percent multiracial and 7.8 percent Black.

In a  Twitter thread, Collins recommends an article on “the history of eugenics and standardized tests, and their relationship to the concept of meritocracy.”

She adds:

Please be mindful that “merit” is an inherently racist construct designed and centered on white supremacist framing that justifies who IS and ISN’T worthy of education, safety, justice, empathy… basically humanity.

. . . These are all ways we racially code our world based on implied beliefs that privilege whiteness. This is also known as the “white frame”.

And, yes, this even applies at a majority Asian-American school. The Model Minority Myth only exists within the context of a continuum that pits people of color against one another yet leaves the status quo unchecked.

So, parents and students are right to fear that Lowell will become just another comprehensive high school.