Giftedness and Race at Lowell High School: Ho v. San Francisco Unified School District (1998)
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Lowell High School is often viewed as one of San Francisco’s most academically gifted and selective schools. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a nationwide movement to desegregate public schools called Lowell’s GPA and test-based admissions process was called into question, resulting in the addition of a race-conscious admissions policy in 1983. I focus on a court case that successfully challenged this affirmative action measure, Ho v. San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) , in which two Chinese-American families accused the district of discriminating against their children through the use of race-conscious admissions. The result of this case was the elimination of race-conscious policies in the district altogether and the creation of a race-neutral “diversity index” for Lowell High School admissions specifically. My project is a historical study that analyzes the Ho v. SFUSD court documents, the demographic data of Lowell High School and the SFUSD, and Elizabeth Anderson’s philosophical framework of social equality to determine the effectiveness of the diversity index. My results demonstrate that the elimination of explicitly race-conscious policies led to a sharp decrease in the Black and Latinx student populations in Lowell. While the Latinx population was able to recover to its original percentage in the school before Ho v. SFUSD after twenty years of the diversity index, the Black population was not. Both remain disproportionately low for the city of San Francisco. This case study shows that we must understand the role that gifted schools and race-neutral admissions play in demonstrating and perpetuating racial inequality.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | [ca. May 2018] |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Daniels, Shannon Rae |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Callan, Eamonn |
| Advisor | Willinsky, John |
Subjects
| Subject | Graduate School of Education |
|---|---|
| Subject | desegregation |
| Subject | integration |
| Subject | philosophy |
| Subject | Anderson |
| Subject | San Francisco |
| Subject | Lowell |
| Subject | Lowell High School |
| Subject | Asian American |
| Subject | Chinese American |
| Subject | gifted |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Daniels, Shannon Rae. (2018). Giftedness and Race at Lowell High School: Ho v. San Francisco Unified School District (1998). Unpublished Honors Thesis. Stanford University, Stanford CA.
Collection
Undergraduate Honors Theses, Graduate School of Education
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- Contact
- shannon5@stanford.edu
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