The San Francisco Board of Education is working to end the merit-based admissions system at Lowell High School, one of the best-performing public schools in the West Coast, in an effort to address the lack of diversity in its student population.
Lowell is the only school in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) where admissions are determined by the students’ grade point average and admission test scores, similar to how colleges evaluate their applicants. In October 2020, the San Francisco Board of Education temporarily replaced Lowell’s traditional admissions system with a random lottery for the 2021 academic year, citing a shift from letter grading to credit/no credit due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
