Magnet Schools

Magnet schools were first developed in the 1960s as a means to achieve a measure of racial integration through voluntary enrollment of pupils from noncontiguous residential areas on the basis of the distinctive theme or program offered by the school. In some large northern cities like New York and Chicago where comprehensive desegregation through mandatory assignments seemed politically or practically impossible, the promotion of magnet schools served as a token effort toward integration. In suburban communities with small but residentially concentrated minority populations, magnet schools were a means of reversing “White flight” from impacted schools.

Although the results were seldom adequate to meet court orders requiring comprehensive desegregation, magnet schools often provided evidence to parents and the wider public that Black and White (and, less commonly, Hispanic and Asian) pupils could be educated together without racial conflict or loss of educational quality. On the contrary, the quality of education was often higher in magnet schools, either because of additional resources provided to attract White parents to a school located in a predominantly Black or racially mixed neighborhood, or because the effort on the part of staff to develop and implement attractive themes produced many of the characteristics of effective schools.

A variation of magnet schools was “magnet programs,” which took at least two different forms. The first, employed in Chicago and many other cities, was a racially integrated program housed within, but separate from, a predominantly minority school. Such a program, typically for academically talented pupils, would enroll its minority participants from the local attendance zone while drawing White pupils from other areas. Although the motivation behind the creation and placement of such programs was often to give a misleading impression that the overall population of the school was racially integrated, they did serve to put a superior program within reach of some minority pupils who would otherwise have lacked such an opportunity.

The other type of magnet program brought together White and minority students, and sometimes urban and suburban students, for part-time educational experiences, often in connection with cultural institutions. Typically such programs would provide 8 or 10 sessions over the course of a year, providing some opportunity for learning and for socializing in integrated groups, without affecting the regular school assignments of the participants. When the cultural or other experiences were designed well, they gave diverse pupils an opportunity to get to know one another and to learn together without the pressures of the school setting.

Different strategies were employed to make magnet schools attractive to parents living in areas of a different racial character than those in which the schools were located. In some cases, significant additional resources were put into schools in predominantly minority neighborhoods in an effort [Page 538]to attract White pupils, a strategy most dramatically (and unsuccessfully) used in Kansas City, Missouri. In other cases, the emphasis was on specialized career-oriented programs at the secondary and even the intermediate level. Yet other magnet schools (typically at the elementary level) adopted a theme or pedagogical strategy that was considered attractive to target groups of parents, whether it was a Montessori-type curriculum, or the use of the arts to teach all subjects, or a “two-way bilingual” program with children learning each other's languages.

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