A Look Back: Taking stock of public school choice in Kappan

In this monthly column, Kappan managing editor Teresa Preston explores how the magazine has covered the questions and controversies about school choice. Although many authors across the decades objected to the use of vouchers to pay private school tuition, those same authors lent support to the idea of choice among public schools. Advocates of public school choice have endorsed various models for providing choices, from alternative schools, to magnet schools, to charter schools.

Race, School Discipline, and Magnet Schools

School environment plays an important role in student outcomes. Increasingly, research has also highlighted the role school environment plays in the White–Black suspension gap. We test whether magnet schools reduce the White–Black suspension gap using data from Tulsa Public Schools. Using student-level and incident-level data from Tulsa, Oklahoma, we explore whether Black students receive exclusionary discipline at lower rates in magnet schools than in traditional schools compared with White students. Using matching techniques to minimize selection bias, we find that magnet schools in Tulsa are associated with a reduction in the racial suspension gap. In magnet schools in Tulsa, we do not find a racial gap in severity of incident or days assigned.

Magnets and school turnarounds: Revisiting policies for promoting equitable, diverse schools

This case study examines how magnet school and school turnaround processes can work together to promote desegregation and improvement. Based on cross-case analysis of three magnet schools undergoing turnarounds, this study draws on data from the 2010 federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program grant and qualitative fieldwork through observations, interviews, and focus groups. In academically struggling schools with high concentrations of students of color and low-income students, successful magnet turnarounds involve changes across many aspects of the schools. While the local context is essential for shaping the magnet turnaround process, these three schools reveal common ways in which participants viewed their schools as successful turnarounds, the elements that supported success, and the challenges that magnets undergoing a turnaround are likely to face. Participants’ perceptions of a successful turnaround were based on increasing family interest and increasing racial and economic diversity, as well as improvements in curriculum and instruction, school culture, and academic achievement. This study helps broaden our definition of a school turnaround beyond higher test scores and reminds us of the origins of the concept, which revolved around desegregation. Lessons from the sites suggest that rather than closing underperforming or under-enrolled schools, districts should consider magnet schools as a turnaround approach.

Building a Constituency for Racial Integration: Chicago's Magnet Schools and the Prehistory of School Choice

Chicago's magnet schools were one of the nation's earliest experiments in choice-driven school desegregation, originating among civil rights advocates and academic education experts in the 1960s and appearing at specific sites in Chicago's urban landscape during the 1970s. The specific concerns that motivated the creation of magnet schools during the civil rights era—desegregating schools and arresting white flight—were decisively wedded to notions of parental choice, academic selectivity, and urban revitalization. While magnet schools enacted innovative curricula in self-consciously multicultural spaces, their scarcity, combined with their function as a spur to middle-class urbanism, ratified new regimes of inequality in urban education. This article frames magnet schools’ engineered success as a necessary prehistory for the rise of educational choice-and-accountability reforms later in the twentieth century.