By day's end, the parents of more than 60,000 children will have made their pitch to get into a magnet school, and Los Angeles Unified School District officials will begin sorting the requests by interest, by grade and, most important, by race.
Only one in four students will be accepted. Others will be left wondering if they have been unfairly left on the sidelines by a 30-year-old process created for a district that no longer exists.
The schools were supposed to be magnets for educational excellence, attracting motivated students to integrated campuses outside of their neighborhoods.
When magnets were launched in 1976, almost 40% of the district's students were white, about one-third Latino and one-quarter black. Magnet schools were required to reflect that balance in a district facing a court order to desegregate.
Today, magnets, as a group, are considered the best schools in a district mostly known for its problems. What many are not, however, is well-integrated. In today's district, fewer than one in 10 students is white. And magnets have emerged as a way of keeping the middle class in public schools.
The best magnets have demonstrated that high-quality, specialized schools can attract families of all ethnicities from throughout the sprawling district. They offer a variety of disciplines tailored to student interests, and attract more than 60,000 applications every year for 15,000 or so open slots. The deadline for parents to apply for fall entry into a magnet is 5 p.m. today. Parents will learn in May whether their children were accepted.
Some magnets encompass entire schools; others are small centers on large campuses. Busing is provided by the district. Their test scores typically surpass those of neighborhood schools, though they vary as much in quality as they do in philosophy.
But as a tool for integration today, most magnets fail. Eighty-seven of the district's 162 magnets are virtually all black or Latino, and almost all of those considered integrated -- those with 30% white students -- are in or near the San Fernando Valley or the Westside.
As the new head of the district's magnet program, Sharon Curry knows that magnets were intended to integrate schools.
But as the former principal of a Mid-City magnet that she says tried and failed to attract middle-class whites, she also knows how difficult it can be to integrate a campus.
