A magnet school is a public school that offers something different from traditional public schools. This difference may involve specialized curriculum, instruction, or both. Magnet schools may bring together academically gifted students, students with an expressed interest in a specific curricular area, or perhaps students with distinct career aspirations. Because students in a magnet school share aptitude and/or interests, they tend to be more homogeneous. In some cases, magnet schools represent overt tracking. The major growth in magnet schools occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. The courts approved them as acceptable methods of desegregation in 1975. By the mid-1990s, there were more than 1.2 million students in magnet schools across America (Yu & Taylor, 1997). During the 1970s, districts devised magnet plans to draw students from the suburbs into urban areas to create racially mixed populations. Magnet schools were, and still are, viewed as forces for integration that don’t require mandatory student reassignment or forced busing (Smrekar & Goldring, 1999).
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