The Limited Attractions

Of Magnet Schools

Connecticut’s Commission on Education Achievement reported last month that the state’s system of public education had gotten an “F” in what the media has dubbed The Nation’s Report Card, more formally known as the National Assessment on Educational Progress. The assessment revealed that Connecticut’s low-income students are performing more than three grade levels behind their middle income and wealthy counterparts in math, with similar disappointing results in reading. This so-called “achievement gap” was the worst in the nation — 50th out of 50 states. While on the whole, Connecticut’s best students significantly outperform the rest of the nation, their excellence only underscores how the state has failed students stuck in poorer, urban school districts. This latest report will, no doubt, launch a new round education reform efforts and perhaps a new landmark lawsuit on the order of Horton vs Meskill in 1977 and Sheff vs O’Neill in 1996.

So it seemed a sign of the times when David Nanavaty, Board of Education member and new president of the Education Connection, a regional service center for 30 school districts in western Connecticut, proposed the establishment of a magnet school for the performing arts at Kent House on the Fairfield Hills campus. The purpose of magnet schools is to “attract” a diverse student body from across a region through a distinctive curriculum and instructional innovation to a course of study that may not be available in their home school districts. The original purpose of magnet schools was to reduce the de facto racial segregation in urban and suburban and rural schools on a voluntary basis. In Connecticut, with its yawning “achievement gap,” magnet schools are also seen as a remedy to the city/town economic disparities.

It was surprising, then, to hear Mr Nanavaty turn the equation on its head and cite local budget issues as a rationale for his magnet school proposal: “If we actually are facing areas where we are going to be looking at seriously having to cut our budget, and seriously looking at the creative arts in order to meet the budget, I would hate to lose that for the students of Newtown.”

So, Newtown, which is in the top 20 percent of Connecticut municipalities ranked by wealth, is hoping to supplement anticipated deficiencies in its own educational program with the offerings of a magnet school. We are not sure what that says about the state of Newtown’s school district or the prognosis for the magnet school concept in Connecticut. Providing opportunities for extraordinary learning experiences in any municipality, rich or poor, is becoming problematic because of the state’s chronic underfunding of education and local resistance to even marginal property tax increases in an economy that increasingly will not support any increases in personal income.

The unfortunate effect of magnet schools in such an economic environment is to create ghettoes based on ability rather than on race or socioeconomic status. Not every student in Newtown, or the 30 other school districts under the purview of Education Connection, will be admitted to the magnet school — only the ablest, the brightest, the nontroublemakers. These are not necessarily the only ones who would benefit the most from performing arts opportunities. Additionally, taxpayers who help underwrite the attendance of the select students at a magnet school are likely to feel justified in shorting the local school district in its efforts to provide similar opportunities for the “unchosen” ones. In Newtown’s school district, a magnet school may hurt as many or more students as it helps.

We applaud Mr Nanavaty for looking for opportunities for local students, using his new influence with the regional Education Connection. Whether a magnet school at Fairfield Hills is the answer will depend on the results of the countless investigations and reviews to come. The underlying issue, however, for the relatively affluent Newtown, for its more needy urban neighbors in the region, and for the state as a whole, is that opportunity at all levels is closely tied to a healthy economy. In an economic climate in which both cities and towns prosper, when tax revenues surge, and hope and expectation grow around kitchen tables and in the referendum voting booth, local school districts and educational programs start to get adequate funding and magnet schools lose their attraction.

We learned this week that the recession is officially over — but the economic crisis is not. Only when opportunity spreads to every town and city, to every pocket of unemployment, and to every disappointed taxpayer will new and lasting opportunities arise in our schools.