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Because standards would hinder "equity" in educational outcomes. The SF Board of Education recently voted to end selective admissions for Lowell High School in

Because standards would hinder "equity" in educational outcomes. The SF Board of Education recently voted to end selective admissions for Lowell High School in favour of a lottery, citing lack of diversity and "pervasive systemic racism". The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.

rahimnathwani 5y ago
There is an effort underway to recall members of the SFBOE: https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/ https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/ There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions. Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentioned the act. (Folks informed his employer, and he was fired.) I find this situation baffling.
- adamredwoods 5y ago
  I am baffled why they are doing a recall? According to the site, the main reason states because their kids have not gone back to school. To me, that's not a good enough reason for a recall (recalls cost money). Public schools are under state and county health guidance.
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    The board could have opened schools months ago, but chose not to. The board opened some schools for a single day at the end of the school year, just to qualify for state funding to pay teachers. The board spent time (whilst schools were closed) deciding how to rename schools, something which has zero impact on educational outcomes. The board has a member who made racist remarks on Twitter and, despite not losing her position, is suing the school board: https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board-tweets/ https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board... These are other reasons to be dissatisfied. More concerning to some people is that becoming a member of the SFBOE is a common launching point for the SF Board of Supervisors.
    - hellbannedguy 5y ago
      The teachers were worried about Covid. Kids weren't vaccinated.
      - ALittleLight 5y ago
        Kids don't need to be vaccinated. Adults who are concerned about it, including teachers, should be. Keeping schools closed because children aren't vaccinated is irrational.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Kids don't need to be vaccinated. A large unvaccinated reservoir population in constant contact with the vaccinated population is how you breed variants that are, e.g., more dangerous to young people (like Delta already is) and more likely to break through existing vaccines (which Delta also is, though not intensely so from the information I've seen.)
        saiya-jin 5y ago
        What the heck are you talking about? Brazil variant for example is pretty brutal on kids, death is not so uncommon result. School is one of the worst places for spreading, since tons of kids lack will/discipline to behave consistently, and are cramped in various classes. Once 1 member of household is sick, the chance rest will get it is pretty high. Remote teaching sucks for many reasons for kids and should be used only when really unavoidable, but to claim kids are a-OK and shouldn't be vaccinated ain't based on science I've read so far.
        bryan0 5y ago
        The CDC disagrees with you: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/transmission_k_12_schools.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... > Although children can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, can get sick from COVID-19, and can spread the virus to others, less than 10% of COVID-19 cases in the United States have been among children and adolescents aged 5–17 years (COVID Data Tracker). Compared with adults, children and adolescents who have COVID-19 are more commonly asymptomatic (never develop symptoms) or have mild, non-specific symptoms. > Some studies have found that it is possible for communities to reduce incidence of COVID-19 while keeping schools open for in-person instruction. > Evidence suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student. > A study comparing county-level COVID-19 hospitalizations between counties with in-person learning and those without in-person learning found no effect of in-person school reopening on COVID-19 hospitalization rates when baseline hospitalization rates were low or moderate. SF has some of the lowest infection rates in the country. So there is no scientific reason to keep schools closed when you see the harm it is causing disadvantaged families.
  - yonran 5y ago
    The San Francisco Board of Education have made many displays of incompetence and malice this past year which have been covered by both local and national media. During the pandemic, the Board of Education announced that 44 schools were named after oppressors (many were justified, but the names committee also made numerous errors) and that principals and families needed to come up with new names for their schools over Zoom. Board member Gabriela Lopez defended even the egregious mistakes, demonstrating that she only cares about “uplifting” and “holding” people of color but not facts https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-renamed-its-schools https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-ren... Unfortunately, Lopez is not up for recall yet, but her enablers are. Alison Collins led the resolution to remove academic admissions to San Francisco’s magnet high school Lowell High. But instead of debating the pros and cons of having a magnet school, she caricatured the school as bed of “toxic racism” and dismissed the Asian parents who supported an admissions criteria as “a bunch of racists”. https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1316582760954331136?lang=en https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1316582760954331136?l... Afterwards, people discovered her previous tweets stereotyping Asians and her pattern of abusing her power (https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1391039211747172352 https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1391039211747172352). When her colleagues selected a different Vice President, she lashed out with a lawsuit calling her opponents racists (https://missionlocal.org/2021/04/alison-collins-strange-and-terrible-87m-lawsuit/ https://missionlocal.org/2021/04/alison-collins-strange-and-...) The other board members haven't done anything offensive but haven't shown any leadership either. They just enabled the radicals. We don't know exactly why SFUSD didn't open the schools this year (negotiations were behind closed doors), but I suspect it has to do with the board members' extreme deference to the teachers' union that endorsed them. I encourage anyone who is a San Francisco citizen to print out the recall petitions and mail them in https://recallsfschoolboard.org/ https://recallsfschoolboard.org/ See also this explainer The Case for Recalling the School Board https://www.engardio.com/blog/school-board-recall-case https://www.engardio.com/blog/school-board-recall-case
    - nhyun 5y ago
      Lopez is up for recall, along with Collins and Moliga.
  - paulddraper 5y ago
    > kids have not gone back to school > that's not a good enough reason On the contrary, it's hard to think of more salient reason than that.
    - adamredwoods 5y ago
      There's a viral pandemic? At the beginning of the pandemic, I wanted my child to go back to school ASAP, but then I reminded by a teacher friend that their health was important, too. I believe no one should be forced to work if the health conditions are unsafe, why should teachers exempt form this? There are too many examples of teachers who did die from COVID-19. https://www.whsv.com/2021/02/17/ny-teacher-dies-from-covid-19-after-work-from-home-request-denied/ https://www.whsv.com/2021/02/17/ny-teacher-dies-from-covid-1... https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/politics/nobody-knows-how-many-texas-teachers-died-covid-19/287-459c384d-5640-47d3-b58e-37b5dca180c4 https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/politics/nobody-knows-how-...
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - deleted 5y ago
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- belatw 5y ago
  Cyan “Recall Chesa Boudin” Bannister is a very bored billionaire housewife.
- Thorrez 5y ago
  >the public has identified the man The father collecting petitions or the person attempting to steal petitions?
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    The person who successfully stole petitions: https://twitter.com/SF_BoP/status/1405219022413590531 https://twitter.com/SF_BoP/status/1405219022413590531
    - Thorrez 5y ago
      Thanks for the info. But I'm not sure I would consider it a complete success. It looks to me like he stole them then people surrounded him and forced him to give them back a minute later.
      - rahimnathwani 5y ago
        At the point when he was confronted, had he already stolen the petitions. The fact that he gave them back doesn't turn that successful theft into a mere 'attempt'. It doesn't matter whether he was confronted a minute later or an hour later.
mmarq 5y ago
I don't know anything about this particular Lowell High School, but selective admissions at the high school level achieve excellency by filtering out "bad" students, which are usually students from disadvantaged backgrounds. If a public school is of very high quality, selecting 10 year olds at random is not much less fair than choosing them based on their grades or extracurricular activities or an essay. Unless we assume that high grades, extracurricular activities or essay tutoring are not correlated with family wealth. If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true, lotteries and quotas don't look like the dumbest ideas.
- yonran 5y ago
  Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out “bad” students including the type of students who don’t care about school who hold back students who do care; the problems of the article are virtually nonexistent at Lowell. I don’t think Lowell was particularly selective (I think something like 50% of applicants get in) and there were plenty of poor students (including myself) who benefited from an academic public school that does have both wealthy and non-wealthy students who care about learning (as opposed to private and suburban schools which definitely do discriminate on the basis of wealth/income). > either we must assume that they are less smart … or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
  - mmarq 5y ago
    > Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out “bad” students including the type of students who don’t care about school who hold back students who do care What do we do about these 10 year olds? We assume they are not "high school" material and we put them in the school for dumb kids? Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them and so the school system can't do anything about it? > The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed). The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism. We are talking about a high-school, which enrols 12 year olds to teach them basic trigonometry and some basic notions of history and literature (in the best case scenario) and not about Hydra hiring PhD candidates to build a death ray. When properly motivated, everybody with a 80+ IQ can succeed in high school, one may argue that you could pick them at random.

rahimnathwani 5y ago

There is an effort underway to recall members of the SFBOE: https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/ https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/ There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions. Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentioned the act. (Folks informed his employer, and he was fired.) I find this situation baffling.

adamredwoods 5y ago
I am baffled why they are doing a recall? According to the site, the main reason states because their kids have not gone back to school. To me, that's not a good enough reason for a recall (recalls cost money). Public schools are under state and county health guidance.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  The board could have opened schools months ago, but chose not to. The board opened some schools for a single day at the end of the school year, just to qualify for state funding to pay teachers. The board spent time (whilst schools were closed) deciding how to rename schools, something which has zero impact on educational outcomes. The board has a member who made racist remarks on Twitter and, despite not losing her position, is suing the school board: https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board-tweets/ https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board... These are other reasons to be dissatisfied. More concerning to some people is that becoming a member of the SFBOE is a common launching point for the SF Board of Supervisors.
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    The teachers were worried about Covid. Kids weren't vaccinated.
    - ALittleLight 5y ago
      Kids don't need to be vaccinated. Adults who are concerned about it, including teachers, should be. Keeping schools closed because children aren't vaccinated is irrational.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Kids don't need to be vaccinated. A large unvaccinated reservoir population in constant contact with the vaccinated population is how you breed variants that are, e.g., more dangerous to young people (like Delta already is) and more likely to break through existing vaccines (which Delta also is, though not intensely so from the information I've seen.)
      - saiya-jin 5y ago
        What the heck are you talking about? Brazil variant for example is pretty brutal on kids, death is not so uncommon result. School is one of the worst places for spreading, since tons of kids lack will/discipline to behave consistently, and are cramped in various classes. Once 1 member of household is sick, the chance rest will get it is pretty high. Remote teaching sucks for many reasons for kids and should be used only when really unavoidable, but to claim kids are a-OK and shouldn't be vaccinated ain't based on science I've read so far.
        bryan0 5y ago
        The CDC disagrees with you: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/transmission_k_12_schools.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... > Although children can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, can get sick from COVID-19, and can spread the virus to others, less than 10% of COVID-19 cases in the United States have been among children and adolescents aged 5–17 years (COVID Data Tracker). Compared with adults, children and adolescents who have COVID-19 are more commonly asymptomatic (never develop symptoms) or have mild, non-specific symptoms. > Some studies have found that it is possible for communities to reduce incidence of COVID-19 while keeping schools open for in-person instruction. > Evidence suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student. > A study comparing county-level COVID-19 hospitalizations between counties with in-person learning and those without in-person learning found no effect of in-person school reopening on COVID-19 hospitalization rates when baseline hospitalization rates were low or moderate. SF has some of the lowest infection rates in the country. So there is no scientific reason to keep schools closed when you see the harm it is causing disadvantaged families.
- yonran 5y ago
  The San Francisco Board of Education have made many displays of incompetence and malice this past year which have been covered by both local and national media. During the pandemic, the Board of Education announced that 44 schools were named after oppressors (many were justified, but the names committee also made numerous errors) and that principals and families needed to come up with new names for their schools over Zoom. Board member Gabriela Lopez defended even the egregious mistakes, demonstrating that she only cares about “uplifting” and “holding” people of color but not facts https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-renamed-its-schools https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-ren... Unfortunately, Lopez is not up for recall yet, but her enablers are. Alison Collins led the resolution to remove academic admissions to San Francisco’s magnet high school Lowell High. But instead of debating the pros and cons of having a magnet school, she caricatured the school as bed of “toxic racism” and dismissed the Asian parents who supported an admissions criteria as “a bunch of racists”. https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1316582760954331136?lang=en https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1316582760954331136?l... Afterwards, people discovered her previous tweets stereotyping Asians and her pattern of abusing her power (https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1391039211747172352 https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1391039211747172352). When her colleagues selected a different Vice President, she lashed out with a lawsuit calling her opponents racists (https://missionlocal.org/2021/04/alison-collins-strange-and-terrible-87m-lawsuit/ https://missionlocal.org/2021/04/alison-collins-strange-and-...) The other board members haven't done anything offensive but haven't shown any leadership either. They just enabled the radicals. We don't know exactly why SFUSD didn't open the schools this year (negotiations were behind closed doors), but I suspect it has to do with the board members' extreme deference to the teachers' union that endorsed them. I encourage anyone who is a San Francisco citizen to print out the recall petitions and mail them in https://recallsfschoolboard.org/ https://recallsfschoolboard.org/ See also this explainer The Case for Recalling the School Board https://www.engardio.com/blog/school-board-recall-case https://www.engardio.com/blog/school-board-recall-case
  - nhyun 5y ago
    Lopez is up for recall, along with Collins and Moliga.
- paulddraper 5y ago
  > kids have not gone back to school > that's not a good enough reason On the contrary, it's hard to think of more salient reason than that.
  - adamredwoods 5y ago
    There's a viral pandemic? At the beginning of the pandemic, I wanted my child to go back to school ASAP, but then I reminded by a teacher friend that their health was important, too. I believe no one should be forced to work if the health conditions are unsafe, why should teachers exempt form this? There are too many examples of teachers who did die from COVID-19. https://www.whsv.com/2021/02/17/ny-teacher-dies-from-covid-19-after-work-from-home-request-denied/ https://www.whsv.com/2021/02/17/ny-teacher-dies-from-covid-1... https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/politics/nobody-knows-how-many-texas-teachers-died-covid-19/287-459c384d-5640-47d3-b58e-37b5dca180c4 https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/politics/nobody-knows-how-...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
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belatw 5y ago
Cyan “Recall Chesa Boudin” Bannister is a very bored billionaire housewife.
Thorrez 5y ago
>the public has identified the man The father collecting petitions or the person attempting to steal petitions?
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  The person who successfully stole petitions: https://twitter.com/SF_BoP/status/1405219022413590531 https://twitter.com/SF_BoP/status/1405219022413590531
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    Thanks for the info. But I'm not sure I would consider it a complete success. It looks to me like he stole them then people surrounded him and forced him to give them back a minute later.
    - rahimnathwani 5y ago
      At the point when he was confronted, had he already stolen the petitions. The fact that he gave them back doesn't turn that successful theft into a mere 'attempt'. It doesn't matter whether he was confronted a minute later or an hour later.

mmarq 5y ago

I don't know anything about this particular Lowell High School, but selective admissions at the high school level achieve excellency by filtering out "bad" students, which are usually students from disadvantaged backgrounds. If a public school is of very high quality, selecting 10 year olds at random is not much less fair than choosing them based on their grades or extracurricular activities or an essay. Unless we assume that high grades, extracurricular activities or essay tutoring are not correlated with family wealth. If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true, lotteries and quotas don't look like the dumbest ideas.

yonran 5y ago
Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out “bad” students including the type of students who don’t care about school who hold back students who do care; the problems of the article are virtually nonexistent at Lowell. I don’t think Lowell was particularly selective (I think something like 50% of applicants get in) and there were plenty of poor students (including myself) who benefited from an academic public school that does have both wealthy and non-wealthy students who care about learning (as opposed to private and suburban schools which definitely do discriminate on the basis of wealth/income). > either we must assume that they are less smart … or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
- mmarq 5y ago
  > Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out “bad” students including the type of students who don’t care about school who hold back students who do care What do we do about these 10 year olds? We assume they are not "high school" material and we put them in the school for dumb kids? Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them and so the school system can't do anything about it? > The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed). The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism. We are talking about a high-school, which enrols 12 year olds to teach them basic trigonometry and some basic notions of history and literature (in the best case scenario) and not about Hydra hiring PhD candidates to build a death ray. When properly motivated, everybody with a 80+ IQ can succeed in high school, one may argue that you could pick them at random.