Another Middle-Class Exodus? Part III (The Non-Attracting Magnet) 
By Martin Harris

All educational-innovation theories sound good before they’re tried. Consider, for example, the New Math, Creative Spelling, Ebonics, The Child-Centered Curriculum, open classrooms, esteem-building, and, of course "magnet schools".

I first encountered the "magnet school" concept when I did some school-building analyses in the mid-‘60’s for one John Henry Martin, a former superintendent of schools who had promoted himself into the intensively political world of forced school integration which followed on the heels of Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision which ordered an end to de jure school segregation by race. His contribution to the white-flight problem which ensued from the Brown decision was to invent the idea that, if you took the old city school buildings from which whites had recently fled to the outlying suburbs, and equipped them with state-of-the-art lecture and lab facilities, swimming pools and fencing rooms, planetaria and super-libraries, they would serve as educational magnets, exerting an irresistible pull to get white students back into the districts and buildings they had recently left, thus keeping them in operation with a racial mix somewhat approximating that which prevailed prior to Brown. My job was to figure out which such irresistible magnets might be retro-fitted into which now-predominantly black-enrollment schools, and thereby entice the self-exiled white students back. It sounded brilliant, but it never worked. As the $2 billion Kansas City example which started in 1985 and ran for 20 years subsequently proved, the attractiveness-score of "magnet schools" is about zero; KC now has fewer middle-class white (and black) students, higher spending and lower test scores, than it did before the experiment started.

Now Burlington, along with a growing number of other districts across the country, wants to reprise mandatory quotas; not by race, this time, but by Socio-Economic Status, using mandatory re-districting, bussing and other devices to insure that non-middle-class kids sit next to middle-class kids in the classroom. Why? Here’s the original explanation from KC plaintiff’s attorney Arthur Benson: "when white students…integrate the schools, their middle-class aspirations would change the school culture…" In short, it’s cultural diversity, not race or SES, which middle-class parents flee when forced diversity is threatened. They don’t want their kids exposed to non-middle-class behaviors. That’s why the both the white and the black middle-class fled Detroit after the 1967 riots, Manhattan Institute scholar Julia Vitullo-Martin writes in a recent Wall Street Journal column: they didn’t want their kids exposed to underclass behaviors in school any more than they could accept their businesses being burned in mob-action street theatre. She writes that, even well after the 1954 Brown decision, "Detroit had excellent public schools that provided classical training in music and art", but then the riots happened and "The middle class simply left, and Detroit’s institutional structures could not survive its departure." The same phenomenon is proceeding, slow motion, in Raleigh, NC, where Wake County schools have an SES mandatory-diversity program in place. Test scores are rising, yes, but scores outside of Wake County are rising even faster; and the middle-class student percentages in the school district continue to shrink as parents flee to put their kids into non-SES-diversity school districts.

Now it’s proposed, in Wake County for example, that installing "magnets" will irresistibly attract these kids back. KC has Olympic swimming pools and robotics labs, a model UN and a zoo, theaters and an arboretum, a mock court and a wildlife sanctuary, film and TV studios, and none of these supposed magnets has shown any attractiveness whatsoever, most likely because parents’ concerns over adverse cultural behavior in the classroom (remember Blackboard Jungle?) trumps such facilities-goodies.

As for John Henry Martin: clearly, magnets, in schools or otherwise, don’t attract him any more; they were a personal profit-center for a while, but now, when last Googled, he was involved with IBM on a "disc-based literacy system." Would it be ungracious to my former employer for me to note that when the country’s school students used McGuffey’s Readers and even Dick and Jane books, literacy rates were higher than they are now? Probably.

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights