Reply to Blair as a whole school magnet?

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Reply to "Blair as a whole school magnet?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No..not at all.  I am just pointing out that the initial goal and the new goal are different.  Nowhere does my post attempt to predict how the new goals will affect the scores or the program.  It is sad that you have jumped to this conclusion.[/quote]

But to raise a different point, the initial goal was a failure from the start.  There's a 1994 study, [url]http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED374202.pdf[/url], referenced in the Choice Study that reached this conclusion even twenty years ago.  Comparing the demographics quoted in that study to the numbers today, it's pretty clear things haven't improved.  From the conclusion of the earlier report:

[quote]The magnet school program and other self-regulated policies designed to foster racial integration are unreliable and ineffective means for achieving desegregated schools.  The policies and programs as they are presently designed and administered in MCPS simply have not been strong or effective enough to offset the demographic change that contributes to school segregation and concentrations of poverty in the public schools.[/quote]

Anyway, it is evidence of MCPS doing nothing in the face of criticism, so the folks reading doom into Recommendation 3A probably have little to worry about.  But anyone who wants to support the magnets should just drop these claims of demographics and just argue on the merits of the actual programs.[/quote]

Depends on who you ask about that failure:

A 2006 Caltech study found that the magnet program at Montgomery Blair High School helped prevent or even reverse "white flight" from surrounding neighborhoods, and may have even played a role in the revitalization of downtown Silver Spring. If Montgomery County wants to revitalize communities like Glenmont or White Oak, schools like Kennedy and Springbrook must become attractive to higher-income families again. [/quote]

I find it so ironic how whites are the cause for racism yet are the only ones to "revitalize" communities and restore rigor to schools.

Isn't that what magnets are really about?  to desegregate?

[quote]Magnet and choice plans have become widespread across the nation and the great majority were devisedas ways to create desegregation, according to a 1994 federal assessment.[/quote]
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED374202.pdf
[/quote]

Yes, that study notes that these programs are wide spread and devised to create desegregation, but it concludes, using MCPS circa 1994 as evidence, that this doesn't actually work!  Placing the magnet at Blair failed to have any effect that could be disentangled from the demographic changes that were already occurring in the area.  The Choice Study reaches the same conclusion--school with in a school magnets don't benefit the general population.

PP mentioned the Caltech paper from 2006, which the Choice Study doesn't cite, maybe they were cherry picking.  However as someone who lives near Blair, I find it implausible that the return of middle class families to the area and revitalization of Silver Spring can be attributed to the prestige of the magnet.  Certainly when I bought a house, pre-kids, I wasn't thinking maybe someday my kids will brush elbows with 100 classmates from a test in magnet.  Close in suburbs have been rehabbing, this is a national trend.[/quote]

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