UNEXPECTEDLY: Elite San Francisco school sees spike in D’s and F’s after dropping merit-based admissions.

Of the 620 students in Lowell’s freshman class, 24.4% received at least D or F in their first semester, according to internal records obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle.

This is almost triple the number of the first-year students in the two years before – 7.9% in fall 2020 and 7.7% in fall 2019. The Chronicle notes that fall 2020 was also the first full semester of remote learning.

The fall 2021 class was chosen primarily based on a lottery instead of a decades-old merit-based system based on test scores and grades, bringing it in line with almost every other high school in the city.

Putting kids into schools that they aren’t prepared for harms the schools and the kids, but I suppose that’s the point.