What is a "magnet school"?
Magnet schools were designed about 4-5 years ago in response to desegregation laws. They were thought of as a way to put specialized programs into schools and hopefully attract students from all over the city. Magnet schools aim to draw in children of all different ethnic backgrounds and from all different neighborhoods into one or two schools.They run differently in different cities: some are first-come, first-served and some of them you have to line up and parents camp out on the sidewalk in order to get in. In Los Angeles magnet schools use a lottery system, but one that takes ethnicity and race into account: if you have a white student and an African-American student applying to a predominantly white magnet school, the African-American students actually have better odds; they'll take more pulls from the hat of the African-American students than from the white students. The reverse is true if it's a predominantly black magnet school, because they're trying to integrate - that's one of the goals of magnet programs. Magnet schools are usually specialized, and usually they attract teachers who are interested in working with a specialized group of kids. As a result, often the schools are a little bit better, as long as it's a good fit for your child. If you have a child who's really math and science focused, you don't want to put them in a humanities or performing arts kind of magnet school, but if you can find a good fit for your child, they're often some of the best educations you can get in the city.
