Magnet Schools Work but with Some Drawbacks

May 25, 1999
Contact: Peggy Shaw, (615) 322-NEWS
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Magnet schools work but with some drawbacks, researchers find

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Magnet schools, developed in the 1970s as an alternative to mandatory busing, have achieved much of what they were designed to do but have also contributed to segregation by social class and a diminishment of communities.

That's the conclusion of two Vanderbilt researchers who have just completed a comprehensive, three-year study of the realities and promises of magnet schools - public schools designed to provide incentives through specialized curricula or instruction and to pull students away from their neighborhood school zones.

In "School Choice in Urban America: Magnet Schools and the Pursuit of Excellence," Ellen Goldring and Claire Smrekar examined magnet and nonmagnet schools in urban Cincinnati and St. Louis and determined that magnets helped to achieve a high degree of racial desegregation, offered more resources and assistance, and supplied teachers with better and more abundant materials. The study, one of the most comprehensive ever done on magnet schools, provided primary empirical research that has been lacking in the field.

The researchers also noted more parental involvement in magnet schools than in nonmagnets, and determined that schools in both St. Louis and Cincinnati excelled at providing parents with a caring, supportive school climate.

Results of Goldring and Smrekar's ground-breaking study left no doubt, however, that some improvement is needed in the search for equity and access to a good education. Middle-class parents, for example, appear to be more informed about education options, and more lower-income children end up in conventional schools that have no specialized offerings and fewer resources.

"Economically disadvantaged families do not have adequate access to information, may not be aware of their options for choice and may not have the formal and informal networks to learn about alternatives," Goldring and Smrekar explained.

The researchers' data also support the concerns of many that school choice can lead to public schools segregated according to social class, and that a neighborhood's sense of community is diminished when children are bused out of the area.

The majority of parents interviewed for the study expressed a belief that the goal of integration is worth the drawbacks of magnet schools, which now enroll more than 1.2 million students in 230 school districts nationwide. And most teachers interviewed agreed. Said magnet school teacher Bill Rogers at Overbrook School in St. Louis: "You can look out the window and see black and white children playing together, which is why we were invented, and on that level for the children, it works."

Goldring and Smrekar concluded from the study that magnets on the whole reflect what schools ought to offer. "To be simple about it, magnet schools are better than the alternative," they wrote. The researchers added, however, that new, long-term approaches to schooling are needed to rebuild America's urban and rural communities.

"Children in neglected and isolated urban areas are vulnerable to the pathologies of rootlessness, hopelessness and violence in the absence of a set of organizational and institutional affiliations that bind families in stable, predictable and enduring social ties," the researchers said. "The challenge rests with crafting public policies that reconstitute school-community linkages in ways that help promote school achievement, neighborhood and family stability, and economic revitalization."

In the study, funded by the Spencer Foundation, Goldring and Smrekar surveyed parents and teachers in both magnets and nonmagnet elementary schools, and conducted case studies in four magnets. Goldring is a professor of educational leadership at Vanderbilt's Peabody College of education and human development. Smrekar is an associate professor of educational leadership at Peabody.

"School Choice in Urban America: Magnet Schools and the Pursuit of Excellence" has just been published by the Teachers College Press of Columbia University.

For more news about Vanderbilt, visit the Media Relations home page on the Internet at: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/News/ Additional information about Peabody College can be found at: http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/

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