So I’m Australian, and here in Australia we have schools for gifted children, where admissions are based purely on standardised test results. Near the end of primary school you go to a special place to take a test, and the test is designed to measure logical thinking and mental flexibility rather than academic experience. And if you score highly, you go to a special school with smart students of all different backgrounds.
And I liked Spider-Man Homecoming in large part because Peter Parker goes to a “magnet school”, which I’m told is the American equivalent. And it doesn’t have any dumb jock types; the school bully is a little Indian brat with rich parents. It felt like a more modern take on high school tropes than all the high school movies where nerds wear bow ties that feel like the writer grew up in the 50s.
Anyway, half of My polycule says that magnet schools are all fake and only serve the rich. There’s no way a low income white boy from queens could make it into a gifted school in our world, based purely on academic achievement. I’m aware that the American system is less fair and money plays a much bigger role, but I thought there was at least a chance that a genius kid could beat the system and get into a good school with good grades.
Do magnet schools exist? Is it all just lies by the rich?
One of my kids went to a magnet school for performing arts. They’re public schools, and they don’t cost extra, but you do have to apply for them if you don’t live in the immediate area and there’s an element of competition to get in.
The idea behind magnet schools is that you can improve the overall academic performance of a school if you increase the diversity of the economic and academic backgrounds of the students. Schools in the US are tied to a geographic area, which in turn is generally correlated with income - poor areas tend to have bad schools with low funding; richer areas have much better schools with better funding. With magnet schools the state/school district/whatever will take a struggling school, pump a bunch of extra funding into it, and give it some sort of academic theme (e.g. visual arts, performing arts, STEM, etc.) with the goal of attracting gifted students from outside to come to the school.
If you want to talk about the underlying idea behind almost every major educational reform in the United States in the last forty years, it is this: to destroy public education. If it is not the formal intent, it becomes the practical effect as the only way to get political support is to get support from Republicans, and Republicans hate public education on every level it is possible to hate something and will support it only on the conditions that it deteriorates public education.
The conservative project is to trigger a doom cycle where high performing students leave a school, that school performs more poorly, more parents are motivated to have their children leave poorer performing school, so more students leave; eventually you have two schools: one with high performing students, one with low performing students; and the low performing schools probalby cost more to operate, because they are going to have a higher percentage of special education students requiring more support. Now, having pulled high performing students out, those schools have less political support in their communities are and easier to defund.
Also see: “school choice” as a conservative talking point. Also see: divide and conquer.
The magnet schools in New York City were founded well before school rankings were published, with most of them founded before 1950.
I’ve met several students from these schools and they’ve mostly spoke about these high schools with praise. They got to go to a school with intellectual peers instead of being an outlier.
Yes.
I’m not saying magnet schools are bad in theory, just in the political climate we are in they are politically advantageous to people who want to destroy public education.
Oh, that’s really informative! So if someone lived in the rural USA and got a really high score for the aptitude test, they could go to a magnet school, but only if their parents knew about it and applied and could afford transport?
Public Schools in the US are generally funded and organized at the State level. US schools in different states (or even schools between US cities and rural areas in the same state) are a totally different experience.
A large district like NYC (the largest in the country by enrollment) is big enough to offer several of these magnet High Schools, which you need to take a test to get into, and are highly competitive. Small rural and suburban districts don’t have the same resources, but often have advanced science and math tracks that can get those kids ready for STEM majors in college. Many US districts also have partnerships with the local Community College, where high school kids who take college-level classes while in high school can get College credit for them. A smart kid who takes advantage of these can knock a semester’s worth of credits out while in High School.