smf: Sometimes the news isn't necessarily new ...from Spring 2005
The LAUSD Magnet program is the legacy of Theodore T. "Ted" Alexander, Jr., for whom the Alexander Science and Math Magnet School in Exposition Park is named. Alexander was responsible for district integration after a 1977 court
order required Los Angeles schools to desegregate, a ruling that
prompted a citywide fight over mandatory busing.
To help defuse
community opposition to busing, Alexander supervised the establishment
of magnet schools. The magnet campuses achieved integration by
attracting students of all races from across the city with specialized
classes that included science, journalism and curricula for the
academically gifted. - from Alexander's LA Times obituary http://lat.ms/20yEXCR
By CHRISTINE H. ROSSELL - from Education Next | Spring 2005 / Vol. 5, No. 2| http://bit.ly/23z24zT
The year was 1968. Martin Luther King had been assassinated, and
American cities were erupting in flames because of King’s violent death
and the decades-long smoldering resentments from racism. In a small city
far away from the churning ghettos of Detroit and D.C., a small public
school was about to enter the racial hubbub and become part of education
history.
 |
Reminiscent
of scenes from the movie and musical Fame, which featured the High
School of Music & Art and became a model for magnet schools, young
musicians sing and play in a bathroom at La Guardia High School in
Manhattan.
|
That fall, McCarver Elementary in Tacoma, Washington, hung out its
shingle inviting students from anywhere in the city to enroll, breaking
the link between school assignments and residential location and
becoming the nation’s first “magnet” school. Thus began a nationwide
experiment to integrate public schools using market-like incentives
instead of court orders. (See sidebar, “
In the Beginning.”)
The following year, 1969, the country’s second magnet school
opened–this one, more appropriately, in Boston, soon to be an epicenter
of the race-based school wars. But, like its West Coast counterpart, the
William Monroe Trotter School, in Beantown’s poor Roxbury section, was
built as “a showcase for new methods of teaching”–enough of a showcase,
it was hoped, to attract white children to a black neighborhood for
their schooling. It was an odd idea, but one whose time seemed to have
come. Within a decade there would be hundreds of such magnet schools all
over the country.
The idea was simple enough: draw white students to predominantly
black schools by offering a special education with a focus on a
particular aspect of the curriculum, such as performing arts, or
Montessori, or advanced math, science, and technology. Federal and state
agencies, anxious to avoid the growing messiness of coercive
integration measures like forced busing, directed new resources toward
these magnets, encouraging their pioneering academic programs and giving
grants for new facilities. Glossy brochures were mailed to parents and
press releases to local media. The hope was that these well-funded,
themed schools would ignite a passion for learning as well as spark a
movement to voluntarily integrate schools.
The names alone give a sense of the new schools’ range and
optimism–the Thomas Pullham Creative and Performing Arts magnet (in
Prince George’s County, Maryland), the Copley Square International High
magnet (in Boston), the School 59 Science magnet (also called the “Zoo
School,” in Buffalo), the Greenfield Montessori magnet school (in
Milwaukee), the Central High School Classical Greek/Computers Unlimited
magnet high school (in Kansas City). Even older and well-established
“examination schools,” such as Boston Latin and City Honors (in
Buffalo), would soon claim magnet status to avail themselves of new
students and additional funds.
An Early Experiment in “Choice”
The first magnets appeared as the school desegregation battles were
heating up. In 1969, the year William Monroe Trotter opened in Boston, a
federal court ordered the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in
North Carolina to use busing to desegregate its schools. The use of
crosstown busing to accomplish desegregation was unprecedented–and the
case went right to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the highly
controversial forced integration program in 1971. A federal district
court in Boston, paying insufficient attention to the ideals of the
Trotter school, introduced a forced busing program in 1974 that set off
demonstrations and riots. The court order also prompted the city’s
educators to include magnets in their formal, citywide forced busing
plan the following year. Thus was born the first “forced busing plan
with magnet options.”
Coming as they did, in the midst of several different national
desegregation crises, early magnet schools offered a relatively
uncontroversial–and peaceful–means of integrating schools. And the
magnet movement got an early boost from two federal district court
decisions in 1976, in the aftermath of the discord in Charlotte and
Boston. In approving magnet-driven, voluntary desegregation programs in
Buffalo and Milwaukee, the courts seemed more than willing to accept
reasonable alternatives to the forced dissolution of geography-based
school assignments.
Though it was another decade before the first southern school
district (in Savannah) was allowed to desegregate its school system with
a voluntary magnet-school plan, the new schools were soon opening
almost everywhere–or, at least, everywhere that public school systems
needed to stem the white-flight resegregation that was overtaking many
urban school districts, mostly in the North. By 1981, there were some
1,000 such magnet schools in the United States; by 1991, there were over
2,400. (See Figure 1.)
These new schools proved to be a remarkably robust and popular trend
in school choice. In a study I undertook in 1989, I found that 12
percent of the elementary and middle school magnet programs in my sample
specialized in basic skills and/or individualized teaching; 11 percent
offered foreign language immersion; 11 percent were science-, math-, or
computer-oriented; 10 percent catered to the gifted and talented and 10
percent to the creative and performing arts; 8 percent were traditional,
back-to-basics programs (demanding, for instance, dress codes and
contracts with parents for supervision of homework); 7 percent were
college preparatory; 7 percent were early childhood and Montessori. (The
remaining preferences, each under 7 percent, included
multicultural/international, life skills/ careers, and
ecology/environment.) At the high school level, the programs tended to
be either career-oriented (medical careers, law and criminal justice,
communications and mass media, hotel and restaurant) or schools with
some sort of entrance criteria. The Magnet Schools Association of
America, based in Washington, D.C., reports a similar distribution of
program themes in today’s magnet schools.
My analyses of the success of these magnets in actually attracting
whites indicate that school structure and racial composition was
important. Predictably, the most popular magnet school structure was a
dedicated magnet, where everyone in the school had chosen it and all
were in the magnet program. These “perfect” magnets, however, were the
least common, because creating them requires that an entire school be
emptied out and children assigned elsewhere or a new school be built.
The next most popular magnet structure, and the most common today, is a
program-within-a-school. Only students who chose the magnet program are
in it, but there is also a neighborhood population assigned to the
school that is not in the magnet program. The racial composition of the
magnet program is different from the school that houses it and is
usually around 50 percent white.
The least-popular magnet structure in
black neighborhoods is a “whole-school-attendance-zone” magnet: everyone
in the school is in the program, but the school has a neighborhood
population assigned to it. That these schools and their magnet programs
tend to have a racial composition closer to that of the
neighborhood–majority minority–only reduces their attractiveness to
whites. However, according to most surveys, although whites prefer
majority white schools, a sizable, albeit smaller, number will choose
schools where whites make up somewhat less than half of the student
body.
Staying Power and an Evolving Mission
Even as courts across the country began releasing school districts
such as Kansas City, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Savannah, Buffalo, and
Boston from long-running desegregation orders during the 1990s, magnet
schools continued to thrive. My 1991 randomized national sample of 600
school districts indicated that the 2,400 magnet schools in the United
States were operating in 229 different school districts.
And it would appear that their ranks continue to swell despite the
declining number of districts operating under court-ordered
desegregation plans. The directory published by the Magnet Schools
Association of America lists more than 3,000 magnet or theme-based
schools as members.
With desegregation waning as a public goal, however, magnet schools
have maintained support by attaching themselves to the school-choice
movement. For instance, the Magnet Schools of America web site now makes
a classic choice-based argument on behalf of magnet schools–that being
allowed to choose a school will result in improved satisfaction that
translates into better achievement. Thus, although proponents of magnet
schools have not disavowed the desegregation goal that is the program’s
roots, they currently place almost equal emphasis on magnets as
instruments of school choice.
One of the reasons for the sustained growth of magnet schools is the
federal government’s steady financial support for the idea. Magnet
schools were originally funded as tools of desegregation under the
Emergency School Assistance Act from 1972 to 1981. In 1981 they were
folded into the Chapter 2 block-grant program, but explicit federal
support for magnet schools as desegregation tools resumed in 1985 with
the authorization of the Magnet Schools Assistance Program (MSAP),
included in the Education for Economic Security Act. Under the new
program, however, magnet schools not only had to aid desegregation, but
also had to focus on improving the quality of education in order to
qualify for funds. The Magnet Schools Assistance Program still exists,
now run by the Office of Innovation and Improvement in the Department of
Education, and with the same twin goals of fostering integration and
choice.
Funding for magnet schools is also part of the No Child Left Behind
Act of 2001, housed in the portion of the law bannered “Promoting
Informed Parental Choice and Innovative Programs.” Funding has not kept
pace with either inflation or the growth in magnet schools, but neither
has it withered away. (See Figure 2.) The MSAP appropriation was $75
million in 1984, rose to $108 million in 1994, and remained at $108
million in 2004. Though the program falls under the law’s choice
provisions, the federal government still considers magnets an important
aspect of desegregation policy, defining a magnet school as one that
“offers a special curriculum capable of attracting substantial numbers
of students of different racial backgrounds.”
The Money Bite
Perhaps the greatest challenge to magnet schools now comes from
fiscal constraints at the state level. Where desegregation has become a
secondary goal, resource-rich magnet schools are often a target for cuts
when money is tight. States such as Missouri, Ohio, and Michigan have
challenged court-ordered desegregation plans in order to reduce their
financial and legal liability. But even states such as Massachusetts,
Maryland, and California that were never parties to a desegregation
lawsuit have been cutting funds for magnet schools. The Prince George’s
County, Maryland, school district, for example, eliminated magnet
programs at 33 schools in the fall of 2004 because of state funding
cutbacks. The only theme programs that will be kept are the Montessori,
French immersion, and creative and performing arts, and they will no
longer be called magnets.
Indeed, there is probably no school district with an extensive system
of magnet programs that has not closed at least one or two magnets
because of a budget crunch. In fact, many magnets are the victims of
their own success: by the 1990s most neighborhood schools had the
science labs and computer technology that had once made magnets unique.
Even McCarver in Tacoma removed “magnet” from its name in 1998 and, as a
result of No Child Left Behind, became a School in Need of Improvement.
Connecticut is an important exception to this trend, but that is
because since 1996, the entire state has been under a state supreme
court order to desegregate. Using a complicated formula approved by the
court, the state funds magnet schools that accept students from several
different districts (at a minimum there must be two) at a per-pupil rate
that increases as the number of districts sending students increases–an
attempt to bring central-city minority students and white suburban
students together in the same school. Thus the scheme eschews outright
racial quotas, but achieves some of the diversity that quotas would
create.
Challenges for the Future
Though finances will always be a magnet school’s primary concern, the
greatest threat to the magnet system going forward is the same as that
which gave magnets their early jump-start: the courts. Even the No Child
Left Behind Act’s requirement that school districts adopt a voluntary
desegregation plan, for instance, may conflict with legal precedents set
in most federal appeals courts. In 2001 only the federal appeals court
covering the states of Connecticut, New York, and Vermont had upheld the
use of race in student assignment or magnet school admissions in school
districts not already under court order; it did so on the grounds that
the state had a compelling interest in racial diversity. But even in
that circuit, several school districts and one state (Connecticut) have
continued to avoid the use of racial quotas in magnet admissions because
they believe using them invites a legal challenge.
The 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing the use of racial
quotas at the University of Michigan–but approving the use of race as
one of many factors in admissions decisions–has had little impact on
magnet schools, mainly because most had already abandoned the use of
quotas. And most school districts now recognize that using explicit
racial quotas in magnet admissions when desegregation orders have been
lifted is risky. When the court-ordered desegregation plan in Prince
George’s County was ended in 2002, the superintendent formed a panel of
experts on magnet schools that was thought to be politically and
ideologically diverse. Our task was to figure out what to do about
magnet school admissions criteria.
All of us were in agreement that race could no longer be used in
magnet admissions. We devised a plan in which the district was divided
into three subdistricts of roughly similar racial and socioeconomic
balance. Students, regardless of their race, could choose any magnet
school in their subdistrict. We hoped that racially diverse student
bodies would result from the individual choices of students, but there
was no way to guarantee it. Since then, as noted above, state funding
cuts have prompted the district’s administration to dramatically reduce
the number of magnet schools, keeping only the most popular. Similar
choices are being made in other districts, where some magnets survive
while others are being closed.
Districts throughout the country are responding in one of two ways:
either adopting a race-blind system of admissions, thus converting the
magnet to a themed school of choice; or constructing a system whereby
race is only one of several factors considered in admission. The former
is more likely to happen in school districts that have very few whites
left and in districts that have had strong appeals court opinions
rejecting the use of race altogether. The latter is more likely to occur
in school districts such as Fort Wayne, Indiana, that have enough
whites left to actually integrate a number of magnet schools and where
there has been no strong circuit court decision rejecting the use of
race.
It is remarkable, perhaps, that despite the reduction in state
funding and the elimination of explicit racial quotas, the total number
of magnet schools has not declined. I would suggest three reasons for
their resilience. First, the great triumph of the civil-rights movement
was its success in getting whites to support the principle of racial
diversity in the schools. In districts that still have enough whites to
make integration feasible, magnet schools are viewed as an effective way
to achieve that diversity, even in districts where court orders have
been lifted or never existed. Second, magnet schools have been
incorporated into the school choice movement as a means of improving
achievement and into No Child Left Behind as a way of increasing the
opportunities available to children in low-performing schools. Third,
parents like school choice. Although undoubtedly there are some who
enroll their children in a theme-based school in order to enable them to
pursue a passion, most parents are probably interested in theme-based
education as a means of
igniting a passion. Magnets have thus
developed strong constituencies locally and nationally and, for the
foreseeable future, remain an important, if less often noticed, feature
of the American education landscape.
- Christine Rossell is a professor of political science at Boston University.
IN THE BEGINNING: How a Small City in the Pacific Northwest Invented Magnet Schools
by Alex Sergienko
Every once in a while things work out. That’s what it seems like
today, as I look back to 1968, when my Tacoma, Washington, school
district opened a magnet school.
Though Tacoma had only about 7,000 blacks–out of a total population
of about 160,000–our minority housing, like that in many cities, was
concentrated in one area and served by schools then in violation of our
state’s de facto segregation rule. The worst “offender” was McCarver
Elementary, which was 91 percent African-American.
In fact, we had begun work on segregation issues several years
earlier. People were coming to school board meetings complaining about
it, and one prominent board member was adamant about integration. We
also had a citizens committee, with two African-American members,
actively seeking solutions. And, like other cities, we had some racial
disturbances in Tacoma after Martin Luther King’s assassination.
We knew we had to do something, but we also wanted alternatives to
the coercive methods of integration, such as forced busing, that we saw
being talked about elsewhere. That’s when we stumbled on an article
about someone in Pittsburgh advocating the establishment of a school
that would do something so well that students would want to enroll. They
called it a “magnet school.” I’d never heard the term, but suddenly we
envisioned McCarver as a school of excellence–good enough to pull in
white students from the more affluent neighborhoods. We wrote a
proposal, called the “Exemplary Magnet Program,” and in the summer of
1968 we received a $200,000 Title III grant to make it happen.
We then mounted a huge recruitment effort, enlisting counselors from
our summer program to make home visits (to talk to parents) and had
administrators make calls to the district’s best teachers. We said again
and again that we would use exemplary practices, such as team teaching
and “continuous progress”–and it worked. Some very good teachers signed
up. And we brought in the most popular principal, then at the best
elementary school in town, to run things.
With luck, a lot of work, and some key support from members of the
upscale North End community, we were able to draw kids from all over,
even from suburban schools on the other side of Puget Sound. And we
opened that September with a minority enrollment of 64 percent, a
27-point turnaround in just four months. Instead of 50 white kids, we
had almost 200.
By 1970, African-American enrollment at McCarver was less than 50
percent, and we had a waiting list for parents seeking to enroll their
children.
After 36 years, I’m still struck by what we were able to get done. It
is wonderful to think that good things can be accomplished in this
world.
- Alex Sergienko was an assistant superintendent of schools in
Tacoma when McCarver started its magnet program. His grandson Max is a
7th grader at a magnet school, in Portland, Oregon, with “a Japanese
emphasis.”
