Magnet schools have had a curious history, related to changing political and legal currents. They emerged and spread rapidly in the 1970s, when federal policy modestly subsidized and strongly encouraged them, but conservative administrations slashed the funds that supported them. Magnets were a singularly popular reform. There was great demand for the federal money set aside for them, and many districts financed their own, though they were slightly more expensive than regular schools because of the training and equipment needed to establish and operate distinctive educational programs. Federal funds were invaluable in covering the starting costs and special materials and training that many local school budgets could not. When funds were cut in the severe recession of the early 1980s, the momentum was broken.
Since both teachers and families were selecting these schools themselves and believed that they were getting something special, the problem in successful magnets often was dealing with disappointed people who wanted to enroll but could not. Another issue was that many magnet programs were opened within regular schools, which sometimes created apparent diversity in the school's enrollment statistics while hiding stratification and segregation within the school building.40
Many magnet programs began with first-come, first-served admissions, and parents waited all night out on the street before their district's magnet offices opened. Those in the front of the lines had information, social networks with information about schools and procedures, intense desire, and the time to do this. Many policies—such as locating the most desirable magnets in segregated black and Latino communities—were designed to offset such inequalities, to ensure integration, and to increase information dispersal to parents in disadvantaged areas. Lotteries replaced waiting lines. Magnets intentionally created highly differentiated opportunities to stimulate parent choice, including Montessori schools and their special pedagogy, schools that offered advanced intense instruction in science or developed talents in dance or drama, highly disciplined traditional academies, and many others. The great assets of magnet schools as a class were considerable. They were voluntary, they created educational innovation and excitement, and they were attractive to many middle-class parents in cities that had few desirable schools. Magnet schools often reported higher educational outcomes even after controlling for other differences between those who attended them and those who did not.41
Choice through magnets has had both benefits and costs. Although civil rights policies can make such choice far fairer than it would be otherwise, it still tends to foster differences. It generates unequal schools and creates tensions as well as providing opportunities. On the other hand, in central city school systems with poor reputations and little ability to reform themselves or hold middle-class families of any race, they have offered positive educational alternatives and helped avoid conflict that can come with mandatory desegregation. Strong magnets can also be widely admired and genuinely diverse schools in cities that had been written off. Even if a district had only islands of high prestige—a few desirable integrated schools that parents were eager for their children to attend—that was better than simply becoming a ghetto school system for poor families who had no choices. The Detroit Supreme Court decision left cities with no options for equitable, uniform, stable, and educationally valuable desegregation across the larger metropolitan communities. Many cities in decline since suburbanization began in the 1950s, wishing to do something to offset this trend, found magnets to be their best option. The extent to which the creative possibilities were fairly available to minority students, however, depended on the strength of the equity policies behind them.
The problem was that as magnets expanded and some became extremely desirable, as the courts dropped desegregation plans, and as the idea spread that race-conscious strategies were not needed, there were increasing attacks on the magnets’ policy to set seats aside when necessary to guarantee diversity. Some parents who did not get their top choice sued. While the courts in the civil rights era subordinated such claims to the constitutional imperative of desegregation, increasingly conservative courts gave priority to individual rights, and the lessons of freedom of choice were forgotten. As the political climate and judicial appointments changed, there were more claims that the rights of white families had been limited. Under the 1991 Oklahoma City v. Dowell decision by the Supreme Court, many court orders incorporating magnet policies were dropped, and some school systems simply ended racial goals and desegregation controls, producing rapid resegregation in magnet schools.42 Magnet schools had balanced the tendency toward stratification inherent in choice programs with a set of civil rights policies. When those were lifted, the pressures toward stratification were no longer offset.
Besides their desegregation policies, the other issue that the emerging conservatism had with magnet schools was that they were part of school systems with too many rules, even though many had a great deal of autonomy. Federal policy switched between the Jimmy Carter and Reagan administrations, from active encouragement of desegregated magnet schools to very limited financing of magnets and no support for desegregation goals and then to advocacy of charter schools. Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush presided over twelve years of anti-civil rights administrations. Even though many magnets had a great deal of autonomy, critics began to attack them for their desegregation rules and for being part of public school systems.
As the courts changed and diversity plans were dismantled, lawsuits challenged the right of schools to hold spaces for underrepresented groups, and some federal courts overturned those policies.43 New magnet schools were sometimes created without desegregation plans, solely to offer special schools. Magnets that were born with desegregation plans and had been integrated often dropped their plans and became more segregated, though a substantial fraction did not, as discussed in chapter 5.
Throughout the magnet experience it has been apparent that parents with better information do better. Ironically, without civil rights policies in place they tend to do much better, increasing inequality. No matter how many strategies for fairness were devised, it was clear that parents who had better information about and understanding of what often became complex choice systems in large school districts were more likely to get their children into the best schools and that parents with less education, fewer connections, and less understanding of the impact of more competitive and integrated schools were less likely to make a choice or have their children accepted.44
Choice and competition for students, even for desirable ends such as lasting and substantial race and class desegregation, inevitably involve winners and losers among schools and reflect the unequal human capital and networks of different groups of parents. To the extent that these schools and programs are successful in becoming (or being perceived as) clearly superior, they can turn into not just means to an end but ends in themselves for ambitious parents, whose battles to get their children admitted sometimes challenge and defeat desegregation goals. Civil rights advocates understood the inherent problems of choice but also the great difficulty in finding ways to provide opportunities for minority children to access genuinely better schools while simultaneously attracting and holding more privileged families to produce the gains of class and racial integration. Given the difficult legal and policy constraints, magnets often became the best option if they could institute strong policies for equity.
Transfers and Controlled Choice
From the 1960s on a standard feature of a great many desegregation plans was the Majority to Minority (M to M) transfer plan, which permitted students to transfer only from a school where their race was the majority to one where it was the minority. In practice, this meant that black and Latino students transferred from segregated schools of their race to largely white schools. The numbers of such transfers were small, normally around 1 or 2 percent of those eligible. Another kind of transfer, beginning in the middle 1960s and spreading to only a few cities, was interdistrict transfer, usually from segregated central city schools to white suburban schools but sometimes to regional magnet schools in other districts serving the same metro area. Some of these plans have been very popular, but only those in St. Louis and Milwaukee reached numbers above a few thousand students, primarily because of the small number of suburban openings in most plans. And now both the