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My son is 3 and a half years old, which means it's long past time for me to be obsessing over his K-12 education. We got lucky with his daycare/preschool; it happened to be the first one we looked at and there was an opening, so we pounced on it. And it's awesome. But increasingly I'm hearing parents talk about moving their kids to a "real" preschool, whatever that means. My kid's learning his letters and colors and some great songs. Does he really need kindergarten prep?
Maybe. A couple years back there was an uproar about cosmopolitan kids whose parents "redshirt" them for kindergarten, holding them back from entering the public school system until they're six years old. And every year we hear of parents camping out to secure their children spots in their schools of choice. Many of these schools are charter schools or magnet schools, and there are frequently fewer seats available than there are parents clamoring for them. Take a look, for example, at students' chances of landing at their (parents') school of choice in Jacksonville, Florida.
But are magnet schools really the unqualified good that gathered throngs of parents seem to suggest they are? I'm not convinced--even though I benefited from magnet schools for much of my public education.
My sojourn through magnet programs began innocently enough, when a first-grade teacher was concerned with my frustration over a simple worksheet. Specialists were called; tests were taken. And suddenly I was enrolled in a class for "gifted" children--which, it ended up, was my largely unquestioned ticket to the highest-quality education available to students in my large urban school district. From 1989 to 1993, I attended one of the best gifted magnet programs in the country. It was at Snoop Dogg's alma mater--because when the program was set up in the 1970s, it was meant to draw more suburban (read: white and Asian American) kids to the inner city. It was about integration. And maybe there was some other social justice thinking at work: with these gifted-identified kids come parents who will push for more resources for their kids and, by extension, the campus.
Indeed, a recent report (PDF) from the Civil Rights Project highlights the origins of magnet programs and schools:
Magnet schools are the largest set of choice-based schools in the nation and today enroll twice as many students as the rapidly growing charter school sector. The intent of magnet schools was to use incentives rather than coercion to create desegregation. Magnet schools, then, represent a compromise between individualism (choosing one’s school) and achieving community goals (diversity). Magnet schools were originally designed to incorporate strong civil rights protections (such as good parent information/outreach, explicit desegregation goals, and free transportation) and most were designed not to have selective admissions processes. This differs from more recent schools of choice that have been designed without these mechanisms. Today, in the aftermath of federal court decisions limiting race-conscious efforts by school districts, magnets comprise a diverse set of schools serving a variety of functions. Many have lost their desegregation mechanisms, which, as we will show, have made a difference in their racial diversity.
However, magnet schools don't necessarily distribute resources equitably, as I first learned when I took mainstream classes and learned again when in my first year of college I returned to my high school to be a teaching assistant and tutor to the school's "lowest-achieving," "at-risk" students. English classes barely had class sets of books--let alone copies the students could take home with them--and the books they did have were packed with uninteresting stories illustrated by cheap watercolor sketches. These kids were being denied interesting, challenging literature because teachers felt they couldn't handle it. Years later, in my first year teaching literature to college students, I saw some of these students, young men from Flint, Michigan who were very bright but also very jaded about school--one admitted to me he hadn't finished reading a book (it was, fittingly, Lord of the Flies) since eighth grade.
So this is what happens, sometimes: school resources are drawn toward magnet programs, while mainstream students and students who should be identified as special needs (but who haven't been because of budget constraints) suffer. Or--arguably worse--the best students are drawn away from a neighborhood school, leaving few resources in their wake. This process of skimming off the "cream of the crop" students has come
