Lowell HS Got Rid of Merit-Based Admissions. Then Students' Grades Tanked

Also happened at TJ: https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/tj-math-students-note-low...

I’m actually amenable to the idea that there shouldn’t be magnet schools at all for kids showing high aptitude. There is an egalitarianism to my wife’s tiny high school in northwest Iowa, where the doctor’s kid and farmhand’s kid went to the same school because there weren’t enough people to merit more than one school. (Actually, two towns, not all that nearby, shared a high school.)

What gets to me is denying that aptitude is a thing that exists that can be and is measured in these admissions systems. It’s scary to see administrators and principals tell lies with a straight face that both the speaker and listener know are lies. That’s right out of the Soviet Union.

> The fact that "half of our student body new to in-person instruction at the high school level and absences among students/staff for COVID all explain this dip in performance," Joe Ryan Dominguez, Lowell's principal, told the Chronicle. "It is important not to insinuate a cause on such a sensitive topic at the risk of shaming our students and teachers who have worked very hard in a difficult year."

It’s a skill that seems common in bureaucracies. Our first principal at TJ was a straight shooter who told it like it is: https://www.insidenova.com/news/fairfax/departing-potomac-sc.... When he left to go to a private school, he was replaced by a real company woman from the county, who used the word “special” a lot and could lie to your face while smiling.

My friends and I once argued about the primary reason top schools "produce" overachieving students. She thought that at least a part of it is from better staff and student to teacher ratio, whereas I argued that most of it is a self fulfilling prophecy. Families that cares most about education will sacrifice the most (time, money, opportunity cost) to get kids into elite schools, and those kids will work harder and devote more resources to test-prep.

This article states that failure-rate went from 8-9% to 25%, but I'm curious how that compares to the regional average. If say 35%-40% of 9th graders failed in surrounding regions, it would be an argument to keep the lottery based system.

> Rather than doing the hard work of examining how public schools fail poor and minority students, leaving them disproportionately ill-equipped to gain admission to selective high schools, education officials in San Francisco discard merit and disguise the much larger issue of the failure of government schools.

This implies that if public schools were working "correctly", every student would qualify for "selective high schools".

First, that's impossible. People are different, they always will be, and nothing the government or anyone else does is going to make people exactly equal. There will always be smarter kids, average kids, and not-so-bright kids.

Second, why is it automatically the public school system's fault? What if something like the number of kids born to unwed mothers is a factor, like this:

https://www.childtrends.org/publications/dramatic-increase-i...

According to the above article, Black and Hispanic women are more likely to have a kid while unmarried. IMO this will have a huge impact on a child's development. And the more education a woman has, the less likely they will have a child while unmarried. Parents with more education are going to be able to help their child more with schoolwork, and it has nothing to do with how well the public school is performing.

> "I have three times as many students as usual failing—instead of one or two, I have three to six. I have some students who have done no work the whole first grading period," Mark Wenning, a biology teacher at Lowell told The New Yorker. "I don't think some of these students would be doing well at any high school, which makes me wonder why they wanted to come to Lowell."

Two things about this quote stand out to me:

1. That doesn't really seem like all that big of a jump in fail rates. Sure, technically that's a 200% increase, but how many students are there total? Even going back to the overall figure across the whole student body, a jump from 8% to 25% varies considerably in significance depending on the total population size.

2. Wondering why the students want to go to Lowell begs the question: it presumes that it's indeed them who want to go to Lowell, and not - say - their families making that decision on their behalf.

This was a very interesting article to me as I am currently looking at high schools for my child. Growing up I went to the high school of the school district of my area, and was not aware there were such differences and opinions. Now living in a different state, a child going to private school and having to apply for different high schools I was unaware of how the admissions process can affect class scores. It does seem to make sense reading other comments with additional references that parent leadership and child determination to do well in school would help overall grades vs the lottery system where parents want children to go to a good school but the kids have no interest.

Many schools experienced declines in academic performance and increases in behavioral and emotional problems in the same period. So it seems a difficult trend to interpret.

Having said that, if it is a consequence it's not surprising. It can be interpreted in different ways though — what's the value add if it's all about the students and not the instruction? Classic educational dilemma.

"Grades" are a metric, not a goal. The goal is to educate and train students.

If you make a metric into a goal, you have already made the metric worthless and are likely to fail to achieve your first goal.