Voters send clear message to San Francisco school boards – Orange County Register

There was no mistake that Tuesday’s election recall message was sent to the San Francisco Board of Education: focus on education, not race politics.

In addition to the Board’s focus on renaming the school rather than reopening it last year, the appalling results were fueled by the Board’s decision to remove competitive merit-based admissions at the College. Reputable Lowell High School.

The admissions overhaul is aimed at admitting more black and Hispanic students to Lowell High School and fewer Asian-American students, a decision diametrically opposed to the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits racial equality.

Asian-American families, seeing their children’s educational opportunities closed under the new enrollment plan, spoke out Tuesday in record numbers. But will the Board of Education finally get the message?

Lowell is the latest front in a campaign unfolding in school districts across the country as education officials sabotage merit-based admissions policies at competing public schools to manipulate racial structures. their clan. Blind admissions standards, like standardized test scores and grade point averages, are rapidly giving way to more subjective and easily manipulated criteria.

Since courts have ruled that racial balance in schools is unconstitutional, public education officials have had to pursue similar goals through more covert means such as weighted lotteries and Overall rating board to reward extra points based on race authorization.

In most cases, the losers are Asian-American children, who find their hard work put aside because school officials believe there are already too many Asian-American students in schools. competitive school. That is certainly the case for Lowell, which boasts a remarkably diverse student body – 82% of students were non-white prior to the rollout of the lottery. But with more than half of those students being Asian-American, the Board of Education found Lowell to be the wrong kind of diversity. Suddenly, racially blind admissions standards were introduced, and a weighted lottery was entered.

The board got the results it wanted: Lowell’s first class under the new lottery system saw an increase in the number of black and Hispanic students. But those increases come from Asian-American kids. Last year’s freshman class consisted of 330 Asian-American students; With the new admissions standards, their number plummeted to 270. Student performance changes every year, but that doesn’t explain such a large drop in an enrollment cycle.

In fact, the new admissions standards are doing exactly what they were intended to do, reducing the number of Asian-American students at the city’s top high school.