Educational Delusions?. Gary Orfield

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      Magnet Schools: Combining Educational Choice with Desegregation

      In the mid-1970s, however, educators invented ways to use choice to produce diverse schools and to minimize the conflicts that often came at the beginning of mandatory desegregation. The most effective combination of choice, educational innovation, and desegregation came with the development of magnet schools. The Supreme Court confronted the nation's cities with a massive challenge in the mid-1970s. In Keyes v. Denver in 1973, it ruled that if civil rights plaintiffs could prove intentional segregation in substantial parts of a city, there should be a presumption that the entire city was illegally segregated, and the courts should issue an order to desegregate it.³⁵ It turned out that there was enough evidence to trigger such orders in virtually every city where a suit was filed.³⁶ The Denver case also ruled that Latino students were entitled to desegregation remedies. But the court's decision came too late, at a time when many central cities’ schools were already heavily minority and had rapidly declining white enrollment as the white birthrate fell and many all-white suburbs were being built. This meant that full desegregation was not going to be possible within central cities—simply mandating that white students transfer to impoverished nonwhite schools was likely to speed their already well-advanced flight. The next year, in the Detroit (Milliken v. Bradley) case, the Supreme Court reviewed the finding of the lower courts that the only feasible remedy for intentional segregation would be a plan including the suburbs, which would increase the possibility for substantial desegregation, involve the region's strongest schools, and make white flight far less likely. When the court rejected this remedy 5-4, it left central cities facing massive problems.³⁷

      The top answer that emerged was magnet schools. Educational leaders in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and elsewhere came up with the idea of using special schools with unique programs, combined with active recruitment, to increase integration. The plans included free transportation and policies that tried to guarantee a specific and stable level of desegregation. Senators John Glenn of Ohio and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, both of whose states had city districts that were ordered to desegregate, succeeded in enacting a federal aid program, the Magnet School Assistance Act, which helped rapidly spread the magnet school idea across the country. Massachusetts was an early promoter of magnet schools.³⁸ One of the key conditions for receiving help was that the proposed school was part of a desegregation plan. Magnet programs expanded rapidly, even in the conservative 1980s, reaching 2,400 schools and more than a million students by 1991, and were highly concentrated in large cities.³⁹ Magnets came a generation before the charter schools of the 1990s and were (and remain) by far the nation's largest program of school choice. Magnets with civil rights policies provided answers to the segregating tendencies of unlimited choice while still greatly expanding parental choice and creating a level of integration that was broadly acceptable across racial lines. After the Reagan administration, however, these accomplishments received little attention.

      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.

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