Bad news out of San Francisco:

San Francisco’s academically selective Lowell High School will admit students using a random lottery for next year’s freshman class, a decision made unanimously by the school board Tuesday after a divisive community debate.

Lowell has for decades admitted students based on a score that takes into account grade-point average and test results while setting aside a limited number of spots for qualified students from underrepresented schools, making it one of the best public high schools in the country.

More:

Board member Stevon Cook urged the public to remember that the great thing about the district and the city is that there are opportunities everywhere.

“This was in response to the pandemic and it’s become a discussion about race and diversity as well as the culture at Lowell and the negative experiences that black students have experienced,” he said, adding those are issues to be dealt with. But for Tuesday’s vote, he said: “We are here today because of the pandemic.”

Notice these competing quotes in the passage below:

Resident Howard Hsu strongly disagreed with the decision.

“Real life doesn’t give out awards for just showing up,” he said. “Not everyone gets into UC Berkeley or Harvard.”

Others applauded the decision.

“It’s way past time that we have only one high-performing high school,” said Diane Gray, a Lowell graduate. “All of our high schools demonstrate high academic and artistic standards.”

Read the whole story.

Last week there was a chaotic school board meeting about the proposal. Parents who spoke out in defense of the selective system were denounced as — surprise! — You Know Whats:

Board members chastised some public speakers for the rude behavior as well as comments that appeared to imply that some students don’t belong at Lowell or aren’t good enough to attend the school.

Currently, Lowell lacks diversity, with less than 2% African American students among the 2,800 students. More than half the students are Asian American.

“This was not a good day for San Francisco,” said board member Rachel Norton after public comment. “What I’ve heard tonight from people who claim to support our system and claim to support our students is disgusting. I’m really overcome by the ugliness.”

Board member Alison Collins, at one point, was heard on a hot mike, speaking apparently to someone outside the meeting saying, “I’m listening to a bunch of racists.”

The new lottery policy is only supposed to be in effect for one year, because of Covid, but it will almost certainly be retained for racial reasons. In the end the left is going to destroy the best public high school in the city, and one of the best in America, for the sake of egalitarianism. Smart kids whose parents can’t afford to send them to high-quality college prep schools had a chance to get a first-rate education at Lowell. Now the school board is taking that away from them, because excellence is intolerable, even racist.

Here’s one lie that people there have to live by: “All of our high schools demonstrate high academic and artistic standards.” This is not true, but it’s what they have to tell themselves to avoid the painful realities of hierarchy — namely, that some students are more academically or artistically gifted than others.

Another lie: that the reason there are so few black kids at Lowell is racism. Do I know for a fact that that’s a lie? No, of course I don’t. But I strongly reject the Ibram Kendi “antiracist” gospel that says all racial disparities are the fault of white supremacy. (And boy, white supremacy sure is doing a bang-up job at Lowell, where more than half the students are Asian.) This is a lie that the left tells itself, and demands that we all agree to, to support its destructive levelling policies.

In Live Not By Lies, I quote Hannah Arendt on the pre-totalitarian societies of Germany and Russia:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

I don’t think the school board members are seeing this as “fun,” exactly, but they certainly don’t care that they are destroying an important part of civilization in the name of inclusion and egalitarianism.

This passage from Live Not By Lies is also applicable to the Lowell situation:

It’s possible to miss the onslaught of totalitarianism, precisely because we have a misunderstanding of how its power works. In 1951, poet and literary critic Czesław Miłosz, exiled to the West from his native Poland as an anti-communist dissident, wrote that Western people misunderstand the nature of communism because they think of it only in terms of “might and coercion.”

“That is wrong,” he wrote. “There is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.”

In The Captive Mind, Miłosz said that communist ideology filled a void that had opened in the lives of early twentieth-century intellectuals, most of whom had ceased to believe in religion.

Today’s left-wing totalitarianism once again appeals to an internal hunger, specifically the hunger for a just society, one that vindicates and liberates the historical victims of oppression. It masquerades as kindness, demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of “victims” to bring about “social justice.”

I guarantee you that’s what’s happening at Lowell now. And when this lottery system causes the quality of instruction nosedives to accommodate students who simply are not able to do the work, the answer will be: more diversity, more egalitarianism, more rage against the idea of excellence.

More calling Asian people like Howard Hsu racist for simply telling the truth. More lies all around — whatever it takes to satisfy that internal longing for harmony and happiness, which in this case can apparently only be realized by taking a valuable civic good away from certain people so nobody else feels bad about themselves.

What a shame for that school. It has been educating the city’s best and brightest for decades. Look at the list of alumni. And now the institution’s guardians — the San Francisco school board — has thrown it away so they can live by progressive lies.

Don’t think for a second that the same militant egalitarians aren’t going to target your school one day.