First Cohort of Lowell High ‘Lottery Kids’ Just Graduated, and They Did Pretty Well Academically

SF’s Lowell High School has already reversed its short-lived lottery admission policy, but the first graduating class from that era just graduated, with grades that were more or less close to the “merit-based” admissions students.

A good deal of the 2022 Recall the SF School Board animus was likely brought on by a decision to end merit-based admissions at Lowell High School the previous year, as the prestigious (but not very diverse) high school moved to have students admitted by lottery instead of test scores. That system lasted one more year, but was ultimately undone because alumni groups sued, many parents were livid, and London Breed’s appointees took over the school board after the recall.

Regardless, that first batch of freshmen admitted under the new lottery system just graduated this week. And the Chronicle has an assessment of their academic performance compared to previous graduating classes, which finds that the lottery kids did pretty much every bit as well, despite the stigma that they only got into Lowell because of lottery luck.  

“That title hung over us like an overdue assignment. ‘Not merit-based,’ they said. ‘Just lucky,’ they whispered,” Class of 2025 graduating salutarian Benjamin Zhang said in his graduating speech, per the Chronicle. “Let this be our final act: To say that we are not defined by a lottery, a label or a transcript. We are defined by what we did with the chance we were given.”

Zhang, by the way, earned himself a full-ride scholarship to Yale.

He’s not the only one who did quite well by Lowell standards. The Chron’s assessment of that first class of so-called “lottery kids” notes that they had an average GPA of 3.45, compared to the average GPA of 3.69 from the previous five years’ graduating classes. They also took an average of 2.65 Advanced Placement courses, whereas the previous five years’ students averaged 2.8 AP courses.

There was a little more difference in the SAT scores, which the lottery class averaged 78 points lower than their pre-lottery counterparts — and over 120 points lower than the class of 2022, which appears to have been a smart one. But the Class of 2025 still scored a full 240 points higher than the national average this year.

So, statistically, this is a very slight step down from the previous merit-based admissions classes. But you also have to factor in the role of the pandemic, and how these kids were entering high school just coming off a year-and-a-half of chaotic and haphazard distance learning.

There will still be another graduating class of lottery-era Lowell grads coming next year, though there may be little reason to assess their progress, because Lowell has already returned to the old merit-based system, and seems unlikely to try a lottery again in the near future.

Related: Post-Recall School Board Reinstates Lowell High’s Merit-Based Admissions [SFist]

Image: Lowell High School via Facebook