schools have helped to keep my family
in a socioeconomically charmed circle—
and keep others out. Yet it was my grand-
parents who made the leap from precarity
to security, and there were no selective
schools involved; their lives simply coin-
cided with a period in U.S. history when
wages rose and the poverty rate fell. In-
creasing labor’s share of national income
would do more to widely lift school per-
formance than vice versa.
Zoe Sherman
Associate Professor of Economics
Merrimack College
Brighton, Mass.My daughter graduated from Lowell, an
experience from which she benefitted
threefold: she received an extraordinary
free education, she got into one of her
top university choices, and she sailed
through those four years because of the
conditioning that Lowell gave her. But
my family recognizes that the merit-based
admissions system that Lowell used
might not have been entirely fair, given
the resources that some better-off fam-
ilies paid for so that their children could
become more competitive applicants.
San Francisco can address this chal-
lenge without diminishing Lowell’s rep-
utation for rigor. I work as an after-school
tutor at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit in the
preponderantly Latinx Mission District.
My students speak Spanish at home,
typically with parents who never went
to college. Our tutoring services are free
and well attended, and our students’
track record of getting into Lowell and
into good universities is impressive. To
instill greater equity in the processes by
which students prepare for and gain ac-
cess to top-performing high schools, big
cities should offer similar networks of
free support.
Peter Albert
San Francisco, Calif.FIXING PUBLIC EDUCATION
As a Lowell High School alumna, I was
impressed by how Nathan Heller captured
the ambivalence surrounding the school’s
transition from a highly selective admis-
sions process to an open lottery system
(“The Access Trap,” March 14th). The
devotion and skill of teachers such as Re-
becca Johnson show that it’s possible to
introduce the school’s legacy of intellec-
tual excellence to a wider range of stu-
dents. But I found heartbreaking the fi-
nancial gut punch discussed toward the
article’s end: the school’s sudden loss of
$3.6 million, and likely twenty per cent
of its faculty, because of changes in the
city’s budget. As a professor in a public
university system that similarly prides
itself on bringing serious scholarship to
low-income urban students, I have seen
that underprepared students can flourish
with the right support. Cutting teachers
and school budgets directly sabotages
such students’ success. There are chal-
lenges in adapting to a changing school
population, but let’s not miss the real
story: the hollowing out of strong insti-
tutions through austerity measures.
Tanya Pollard
Professor of English
Brooklyn College, CUNY
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Heller’s piece stirred up uneasy reflec-
tions on urban public schools with se-
lective admissions. My father attended
Stuyvesant in the nineteen-sixties, I at-
tended Bronx Science in the nineties, and
my daughter is currently a student at
Boston Latin, and a member of the last
class to be admitted solely via entrance
exam. Heller writes that “fulfilling any
promises that public education makes de-
pends on genuinely opening the doors to
underprivileged students while carrying
the striving middle class through, too.”
But through to where? A school might
be able to change the odds of a particu-
lar young person’s landing in a particular
station in her adult life, but a school can’t
change the distribution of such stations.
In a political economy in which decent
livelihoods are artificially scarce, selective
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