Black Only Schools Proposed

[glatt]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

I've also heard bad things about magnet schools but I don't know much about them.

We've got a magnet school two blocks from our house. The parents of the kids who attend it love it.

We (the neighborhood) don't care for it too much. You have to enter a lottery to get in and there is only something like a 30% acceptance rate. (We chose not to apply, because we wanted our kids to have friends in the neighborhood instead random connections all over the county. Also, all the schools around us are good, so we saw no need to get into this "good" school.) What ends up happening is that everyone in our neighborhood gets bussed to another (good) neighborhood school a few miles away, and there's a large influx of strangers zooming into our neighborhood every morning to drop their kids off at the magnet school. It's not thier neighborhood, so they don't care about the people who live there or obeying the speed limit. On some occasions, late parents dropping their kids off at the magnet school have blown past our school bus stop as our kids are climbing onto the bus with its lights flashing.

Every couple of years, they look at the enrollments for all the neighborhood schools and shift the boundaries around to get rid of overcrowding in some of them. Since our neighborhood has no school to call its own, we are the ones who always end up getting moved around in order to make things even at all the schools.

So I am bitter at the elitist magnet school families here. I take a skeptical view of magnet schools in general. They are self selecting, so any heightened test scores they have is really just because the best students were removed from the other schools and pooled in one location. This lowers the scores of the other schools and heightens the score at the magnet school.

If you have a kid in a magnet school, it is probably a good thing for them, because they are surrounded by the "best and the brightest," but I think magnet schools may be bad for the school system overall, and there is little or no proof that they offer a better education in an area with already decent schools.