Developing Big-City Magnet School Programs 263 magnet schools, which are probably the most flashy and salable component of a program for instructional improvement, is that massive physical and human resources will be used for them while other components of such a program will get little attention. If this is allowed to happen, inner-city schools will continue to be undesirable places for learning, and the educational opportunities for young people in the big city will not be markedly better in the future than they are today. Urban Redevelopment It is possible that magnet schools may play a vital role in the redevelopment of the inner city and in the conservation of racially and economically mixed neighborhoods by offering the superior opportunities for schooling needed to retain middle-class families in the central city. In Houston, school officials believe that their magnet program has helped encourage movement of young middle-class families into several deteriorated neighborhoods where older but structurally sound houses are now being restored. In Cincinnati, the magnet programs may be contributing to stability in attractive renewal neighborhoods such as the Walnut Hill neighborhood and the Mt. Adams area, which is close to already redeveloped parts of the central business district. Our description in Chapter 9 gives some indication of what the Whitney Young Magnet High School might contribute to the overall renewal of Chicago. But the generalization that magnet schools may play a major part in city planning cannot be viewed as an established fact in any city. Indeed, this generalization can never be much more than a hypothesis until school and other government officials in some city do more to break down the walls that have traditionally separated public school planning from most municipal planning efforts. CONCLUSION We have tried to identify some of the key considerations in developing and implementing a big-city magnet school program that not only might enroll a significant number of students, but also might appreciably improve educational opportunities and contribute to improving the overall quality of life throughout a city. On the basis of this analysis, one might construct a continuum for characterizing the seriousness, utility, and comprehensiveness of big-city magnet school programs. The two poles of the continuum could be described as follows. 26.1 Desegregation, Education, and Big Cities The Magnet School Hustle Largely an attempt to satisfy the actual or probable desegregation requirements of a federal court, the magnet school plan is hastily thrown together, and a few hundred middle-class or upwardly mobile low-status students are induced to enroll in it. Much of the program consists of established components given glamorous new labels, and use of these labels makes it politically feasible to divert more resources to schools enrolling a substantial proportion of middle-class students or to schools in which middle-class students are taught separately in a magnet class. A limited number of middle-class families are thereby persuaded to keep their children in the public schools for a few more years, often at substantial costs for transportation and instructional programming. Meanwhile, a large proportion of students in the central city continue to attend predominantly one-race schools; some of the best students and teachers from dysfunctional. predominantly low-status schools transfer to the magnet schools; and, although a few superficial advantages such as slightly reduced class size may accrue on paper to some of the inner-city schools, the central city as a whole and its school district remain for the most part racially and socioeconomically segre gated and continue to evolve still further in this direction at a slightly slower rate. Magnetization for City Renewal Before a court order for district-wide desegregation is imminent, school officials begin to develop a magnet school program designed to improve educational opportunity for a few thousand students, to con tribute to the redevelopment of the inner city, and to help maintain high-quality neighborhoods in the central city and the metropolitan areas as a whole. Following a year of careful planning, a substantial program is aimed initially at improving the match between the learn ing styles of students and the public school opportunities currently available to them and at maintaining and increasing racial and socioeconomic balance in schools and neighborhoods. In the following few years the program is painstakingly expanded to include as much as 40 percent of the public school students in the central-city schools. At the same time, care is taken not to deprive predominantly lowstatus schools of their best students and faculty, substantial resources Developing Big-City Magnet School Programs 265 are made available and used to support efforts at systematic reform in these inner-city schools, and an overall plan for improving the quality of instruction available to all students in the district is worked out and implemented. Civic and business leaders and other interested citizens are enlisted to support all these activities as well as efforts, where ap propriate and possible, to expand the magnet school program to include suburban school districts around the central city. School plan. ners begin to work closely with municipal and metropolitan planning agencies to establish magnet school facilities in present or potential neighborhoods designated for urban renewal or community conservation. By the end of a ten- or fifteen-year period, attractive public school opportunities are available throughout the central city and the metropolitan area, and socioeconomic and racial isolation have been substantially reduced. This admittedly visionary description of what magnet schools might help to accomplish is far from realization in any big city at the present time. It cannot be achieved, furthermore, unless magnet school programming is explicitly worked out in conjunction with other aspects of educational policy and planning that are mentioned elsewhere in this book, particularly in Chapter 17. Magnet school programs will not by themselves contribute much to the solution of major problems in our large cities, but the degree to which magnet schools are coordinated with educational and community planning will have a major bearing on whether or not the neighborhoods in which they are located will continue to deteriorate or will, instead, constitute magnetic nuclei for city renewal. Notes 1. A Project Management Committee consisted of the Superintendent for Instruc tion, the Executive Deputy Superintendent for Instruction, the Deputy Superinten. dent for General Instructional Services, the Deputy Superintendent for Administra· tion, and the Deputy Superintendent for Occupational and Continuing Education. 2. Martha Shirk, "Board Reviewing City 'Magnet School' Plan." St. Louis PostDispatch, February 10, 1970, SA. 3, Daniel U. Levine and Connie Moore (Campbell), The Magnet School Program in Houston, Texas: A Description and Commentary (Kansas City, Mo.: Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems in Education. School of Education. University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1976, mimeo); id., “Magnet Schools in a Big City Desegrega. tion Plan," Phi Delta Kappan 57 (April 1976): 507-509. 4. Jeff Gelles, "Selling the Magnet Schools to Parents." St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 1, 1976, 3A. 266 5. ibid. Desegregation, Education, and Big Cities 6. Herbert Thelen. Classroom Grouping for Teachability (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967); Bruce R. Joyce and Marsha Weil, Models of Teaching (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972); David E. Hunt. "Person Environment Interaction: A Challenge Found Wanting before It Was Tried," Review of Educational Research 45 (Spring 1975):-209-230. 7. Peter D. Tomlinson and David E. Hunt, “The Differential Teaching Effectiveness of Three Teaching Strategies for Students of High and Low Conceptual Level," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Minneapolis, Minn., March 1970. 8. Robert F. Peck. "Needed R and D in Teaching.” Journal of Teacher Education 27 (Spring 1976): 19. 9. For descriptions of the most prominent of these types of approaches, see Sistems of Individualized Education, ed. Harriet Talmage (Berkeley, Calif.: McCutchan Publishing Corp., 1975). 10. Linda Lockhart Jones. "First-day Attendance Off at Magnet Schools. "St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 8, 1976, 1 6F. 11. Elizabeth G. Cohen, "The Effects of Desegregation on Race Relations." Law and Contemporary Problems 32 (Spring 1975): 271-299. 12. Ibid., 289. 13. Ibid., 297. 14. Janet W. Schofield and Andrew Sagar. "Interracial Interaction in a New 'Magnet' Desegregated School," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., August 1976. 5-6. See also Janet W. Schofield, "Ethnographic Study of a 'Nearly Integrated Urban Middle School." Phase 1 Project Report. NIE Contract No. 400-76-0011 (Pittsburgh. Pa.: University of Pittsburgh, 1976, mimeo). 15. "Magnet Schools Short of Goals," New York Times, July 25, 1976. 23. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. "Chronicle of Race, Sex, and Schools." Integrateducation 14 (May-June 1976): 54. 19. Quoted ibid. (July-August 1976): 35. 20. Personal interview, January 22, 1976. in Levine and Havighurst, REPRODUCED SY CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS WITH PERMISSION OF COPYRIGHT CLAIMANT (1977) 1. Desegregation and Resegregation: A Review of the Research on White Flight from Urban Areas Robert G. Wegmann A recent summary of research on school desegregation prepared by the National Institute of Education for the Ford administration shows that the flight of whites from American cities is different from city to city, and no one knows which governmental policies might influence or control this phenomenon.1 Various authors have noted that the social sciences seem to offer little in the way of understanding (or controlling) the problem of resegregation, and there has been no systematic national effort to study the impact of school desegregation over a period of years. In the furor over some recent statements made by James S. Coleman, little attention has been paid to one of the major points of his initial paper, namely, that the federal government has failed to attempt any serious analysis of the massive data that it routinely collects on school racial proportions. 3 Such an analysis would be a very demanding task. The recent debate between Coleman and his critics has made clear the fact that desegregated schools exist within a multitude of contexts, and each of these contexts influences what does or does not happen in the school.4 There is an ongoing process of suburbanization, which surely would have occurred even if there were no racial minorities but which disproportionately involves the white population. There has been a ma |