San Francisco’s Lowell High School is the oldest public high school west of the Mississippi River. It is one of California’s highest-performing public schools, with an academically rigorous curriculum that prepares students for college, and it has even been the subject of a documentary highlighting its high-stress, “pressure cooker” environment. More recently, though, the high school has found itself at the center of heated public discourse regarding San Francisco’s educational system. Before 2021, Lowell was the only public high school in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to have an academically merit-based admissions system. However, in February 2021, the city’s Board of Education overwhelmingly voted to overturn the merit-based system in favor of following the lottery-based admissions system of other schools in SFUSD, in the belief that it would remedy the underrepresentation of non-Asian students of color at Lowell High.
During the 2021–2022 academic year—Lowell’s first full year with the new lottery system—the newly-admitted freshman class saw a more than threefold increase in the number of students who earned at least one D or F grade, from about 8 percent to almost 25 percent. This rapid increase contrasts the mild declines in academic performance among 10th to 12th graders at Lowell, who had received admission to the school through the merit-based system. Rather than reflecting the effects of pandemic-era school closures on educational quality experienced by the general student body, the grades of those admitted through the lottery system uniquely declined. The data reveals that the root cause of barriers to educational access in San Francisco is not the type of admissions utilized by high schools, but rather the multifaceted, structural issues with funding and pedagogy that pervade the city’s school system. Not only is there a lack of equitable funding in San Francisco public schools at the elementary and middle school level, but of the programs that do receive funding, few are designed to appropriately build and foster a strong school climate—one that encourages positive reinforcement, learning, and interactions. To effectively build educational quality from the ground up, primary schools that need additional support could adopt a “community school” model, providing integrated student support and expanded learning opportunities.
There is an immense need for the city government to address inequities in educational access and quality of education. For example, in San Francisco, only 19 percent of Black students in public schools reportedly passed state reading exams. This rate contrasts with the 75 percent pass rate of high-performing elementary and middle schools like Alice Fong Elementary School, which is commonly regarded as a “feeder” school to Lowell.
Amid all of this turmoil, the California funding plan for education is projected to make SFUSD cut funding by millions of dollars in the next school year, in an attempt to balance its $125 million budget deficit. As a result, SFUSD administrators voted last year to cut over 200 positions, of which a majority were instructors in the district.
However, there is evidence to show that the gaps in educational achievement across SFUSD are not solely due to economic inequality. In fact, seven out of the 10 top-performing SFUSD public middle schools have an over 30 percent economically disadvantaged student population. Additionally, the city provides more funding per student if they are eligible for free or reduced-price meals. It is clear from this data that the problem is not necessarily just a lack of funding itself, but also how this funding is being used. One area in particular need of funding for schools that have poor educational outcomes is programs that foster a positive school climate. Underserved students often face issues such as economic insecurity, food scarcity, and mental health challenges, making it difficult to focus on their academic lives. Building a positive school climate means working to increase the ability of students to engage in their academic environments—for underserved students, this means supporting them through challenging real-world situations as well.
Rather than fix these problems, though, changing Lowell High’s admissions policy simply revealed these issues’ deep structural roots. In fact, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to restore the merit-based admissions system starting in 2023. Therefore, all that the Lowell case has shown is that attempting to tack on a band-aid solution by throwing underprepared, underprivileged students into a pressure cooker environment, shockingly enough, does not magically fix structural issues in the city’s educational system. Instead, much is still left to be done in order to ensure educational access for all. To address the dual issues of economic inequality and educational quality impeding the potential of San Francisco’s students, there must be a fundamental change in pedagogy across the city’s neighborhoods. To this end, I propose a more widespread use of the “community school” model.
The community school model is an educational model that relies on project-based learning and understanding. Community schools emphasize integrated student support and collaborative leadership practice. They allow for schools to address students’ situations with real-world issues by providing programs like counseling services, health services, family resource centers, and more. After all, how are students supposed to focus on academics if their basic needs are not being met? Community schools target these concerns while also fostering an encouraging school climate through de-escalation tactics, positive reinforcement, and social-emotional resources, which work to improve educational quality and academic achievement.
In San Francisco, the community school model has most notably been integrated into Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Middle School, where more than 70 percent of the student population is low-income. Under this new educational model, suspensions at MLK have decreased by almost 85 percent over an only five-year period of implementation. Additionally, one notable community school model case study at the high school level is Northeast Early College High School in Austin, Texas. After implementing appropriate community school programs, the school’s graduation rates rose more than two-fold from 48 percent to 98 percent in five years.
What differentiates this model from simply providing additional support services is the all-in involvement that community schools facilitate. For example, the model involves a full-time community school coordinator, who directly and solely works to identify and fill student needs. The coordinator serves as a way to provide resources and conduct a meta-analysis of the school’s educational model so that schools are able to more quickly and effectively adjust to the needs of students, which is particularly important in low-income neighborhoods.
While the concept of a community school has existed for more than a century, its current iteration and the modern model began being implemented in the early 1990s. Oakland Unified School District in California was one of the first major school districts to begin transitioning to a full community school-modeled district. Today, there are roughly 5,000 community schools in the United States. District leaders across the country are beginning to see the merits of the community school model, with one study showing that for every dollar invested in community schools, 15 dollars are returned in social benefits to students.
The case of Lowell High School has highlighted that the educational disparities present in SFUSD run far deeper than we realize. It is not enough to simply provide a competitive school environment to students who have been significantly under-resourced for their entire academic careers. We must start earlier. California and the SF Board of Education must invest in effective educational models if they ever hope to begin fixing the deep-rooted inequities that San Francisco faces in educational access and quality.