Hunched at high-performance computers lit by the soft glow of floor lamps, Fulton High School students were designing a CD jewel case and an iTunes page. This graphics design lab shares space with a photography studio, where students can practice portraits and fashion shoots.
Nicole Cooney, a junior, is editing photos she shot of Fulton’s latest basketball triumph so they can be published in the Knoxville Focus newspaper.
“I get to learn how real journalism works... and it’s just insane on how many opportunities we get here,” Cooney said.
Knox County magnet schools have recently attracted vocal supporters and repelled those who considered them a waste of money. Last year the school district proposed axing the themed educational programs, and in January it considered closing Career Magnet Academy altogether. Public outcry doomed the move. But the way magnet schools are operated and evaluated remains in flux.
Magnet schools offer a specialized approach to public education, often focused around a subject area like the performing arts or STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Students from across the district may apply, and transfer slots are allocated through a lottery.
Diversity drivers
Magnet programs across the U.S. were originally created as a response to court-ordered desegregation. The idea was to offer a speciality so distinctive that it would magnetically attract students from different racial and economic backgrounds, even if the school was a long bus ride away.
“There was a thought that if schools were created that would be of high quality that could draw students across the school district, maybe outside the neighborhood, that we would then start eliminating the need for forced busing,” explained Todd Mann, executive director of Magnet Schools of America. “These schools would be developed with diversity as the foundation.”
Magnet Schools of America, an association of 2,200 magnet schools and school districts, offers a certification program to distinguish high-quality magnet schools. Knox County is a member of the organization, but none of its magnet schools have been certified.
Based on the association’s criteria, diversity is the first of five pillars of magnet school success, Mann said.
Magnet programs spread in the 1970s, he said. By the next decade, many school districts in the South were operating under a desegregation order that included a voluntary magnet school component.
In 1985, the federal government began the Magnet Schools Assistance Program to fund magnet programs that would reduce “minority group isolation” while strengthening education. Knox County created its first magnet program eight years later, at Beaumont Elementary.
Rev. John Butler, president of the Knoxville NAACP branch, said that happened after the local NAACP filed a complaint about school segregation with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. Eight more magnet schools followed during the next 20 years. Butler noted the magnet schools are almost all in majority-black neighborhoods where community members have voiced concerns about equity -- resulting in another, still-unresolved civil rights complaint being filed by the NAACP a few years ago.
This is how the magnet concept is meant to play out: Cooney, who is white, chose a magnet school in a mostly-black neighborhood because she liked the theme. She has loved photography since elementary school, and now has an internship with a “PBS NewsHour” student reporting lab. There, she has worked on a skit for a video about how zip codes were used to maintain segregation.
Her parents were initially worried about letting her attend Fulton. Cooney said people in Karns, where they live, told them the school was plagued by fights and gang wars. “My parents were scared about that and the neighborhood,” she said. “But once they toured the school and met the people they were like, ‘Yeah, this is definitely the school for you.’”
Jon Rysewyk, chief academic officer for Knox County Schools, acknowledges that magnet schools were originally intended to diversify the student population. However, over time each superintendent developed different ideas about what magnet programs should accomplish, he said.
Decision makers still have conflicting ideas about magnet goals. School board member Patti Bounds argued last year that the magnet programs were originally intended to increase literacy and reading comprehension, but failed. When Knox County Superintendent Bob Thomas suggested pulling magnet funding, he suggested spending it instead on remedial reading efforts. He pointed to poor reading proficiency at two magnet elementary schools in the inner city, Sarah Moore Greene and Green.
In more recent years some magnets have been created to narrow achievement gaps at low-performing schools, according to Magnet Schools of America. But there has been little study of whether magnet programs actually improve academic performance. A 2017 report by the Brookings Institute, a centrist think tank, called for more study of this and noted how much more attention has been paid to charter schools -- even though they are a much newer “school choice” concept.
Evolving goals
Knox County used to track whether its magnet programs were attracting students from different racial and economic backgrounds, Rysewyk said.
By that standard, many district magnets fall short. Only two have wait lists on a regular basis: L&N STEM Academy and Beaumont Magnet Academy. L&N is one of only two magnet schools in Knox County with no designated “school zone,” so all its students are transfers. Beaumont offers the only full honors elementary program in the county, and its magnet also has an arts and museums component. Beaumont and L&N typically have room for less than half of the students who apply to transfer, school district records show.
Like Beaumont, the other magnet schools with a school zone are in urban, low-income parts of east and north Knoxville. While Beaumont receives between 115 and 155 transfer applications a year, Austin East gets only about two dozen for its arts magnet, and Sarah Moore Greene Elementary often gets even less for its media and communications program.
‘We want to ask if people aren’t choosing that, why aren’t they choosing that?” Rysewyk said. “Some will say advertising -- but we have spent a lot of money and time and resources on that. Some will say location. Some will say reputations of schools. All those things become factors for any individual.”
Many students and their families seem unaware of the magnet options. Natalie Duncan, a sophomore at Bearden High, seems a prime candidate for the arts magnet at Austin-East. She has choreographed and danced in two musicals this school year, is acting in a play, teaches dance classes and is attending Governor’s School for choir this summer.
“I knew that there were some schools that specialized in arts, but I didn’t know that there was a magnet school for it,” she said. Duncan suggested that Austin East students should recruit by visiting middle school fine arts classes and inviting younger kids to performances.
In the past, magnet schools have participated in showcases each spring to provide families information.
The showcase at Cedar Bluff Middle School is what led Lindsey French to decide to attend Career Magnet Academy as a freshman last fall. “The idea of getting through college faster just sounded amazing,” she said. “I applied that night, I was so excited about it.”
But the school district isn’t going to pay for those showcases any more. Rysewyk said each magnet school is now given $30,000 to $40,000 to be spent on curriculum rather than advertising. It’s an “if you build it, they will come” approach, he said.
That change is partly because the district decided about a year and a half ago to stop measuring magnet school success based on the number or diversity of transfer students, Rysewyk said. Emphasis is on the educational value of the theme and how it builds the school’s identity.
“I think it kind of cheapens the magnet concept to say we have to hit a certain quota of kids in order for it to be successful,” Rysewyk said.
This change in philosophy solidified during last year’s budget debate.
“I think it helped redefine as a district how we think of those programs,” Rysewyk said. “It allowed us to lay to rest some of those old, archaic thoughts around what a magnet’s supposed to do, and it really made us think about them as innovative programs that we want to be able to have in our schools.”
But Butler with NAACP noted that he hadn’t heard about this policy change, and the district needs to be more transparent about the purpose of magnet schools. He said it’s the only way they can be evaluated fairly.
If magnet schools shouldn’t be judged on whether they bring more diversity to a school, how should they be judged? Rysewyk says measures like test scores and graduation rates are important, as they are at any school. But he also thinks the district will use parent and student satisfaction surveys as a measure.
Whole-school focus
The way magnet programs operate has been changing, too. Three to five years ago, some functioned like a school within a school. Transfer “magnet” students filled the specialized program, while neighborhood students attended regular classes separately.
“If we’re saying (magnet programs are) just for diversifying, then what are we saying about the kids that are zoned there?” Rysewyk asked. “Are they not worth the programming?”
West High isn’t even considered a magnet school anymore (although it still take transfers when space is available). Rysewyk says that’s because its International Baccalaureate program is now available to all students in the building, and because the district is offering more advanced course options at all its high schools. (Bearden Middle School also shifted to an IB curriculum a few years ago, but was so full it couldn’t take transfers, he said.)
Today, most schools try to expose all students to the magnet theme. The exceptions are Beaumont’s honors program, which has eligibility testing, and Fulton’s communications magnet, which is one of its “specialized learning communities.”
Shay Boswell chose Beaumont Academy for her son, now in fifth grade, instead of their neighborhood school in Cedar Bluff. As a member of the League of Women voters, Boswell advocated for magnets to have a larger role in the district’s new strategic plan.
“My son is high-functioning autistic, and the arts are really what opens up his world,” Boswell said. “Because of the arts program, he hasn’t had any special treatment and has been able to stay integrated in the classroom.”
Boswell is also grateful that her son has been exposed to more diverse group of kids than ever before. That’s partly because the whole student body participates in the arts and museum programming.
Rysewyk noted, “One of the negative, unintended consequences for magnets… nationwide is if it is just to build elites, and not have exposure to all students. I think that we’ve purposely made that decision to say we want to build quality programs and expose everyone to (them). And our hope is that other people will want to be part of that too, and they’ll exercise their choice to transfer.”
Mann says Magnet Schools of America supports integrating the magnet theme throughout the school. “There are some schools that are magnets within a school,” he said. “But we just think if you’re going to have a theme and a curriculum that surrounds it, then it needs to be embedded and shouted throughout.”
The future of Knox County magnets?
Steve Morrell, the magnet facilitator and a teacher at Fulton, said he’s not sure the school will continue to be called a magnet next year, although it will still accept transfers to the communications program.
However, Rysewyk insists there are no plans to eliminate any more magnet school designations right now.
Last year Thomas proposed cutting magnet school funding for a savings of about $1 million. The same budget would have stripped funding from Project GRAD, a program intended to increase high school and college graduation rates among low-income students.
But hundreds of community members and the Knox County NAACP protested the cuts, complaining that the district was targeting programs that benefit low-income, inner-city students -- who are mostly black.
In the end, “Magnet school support” received about $650,000 in the fiscal 2019 budget, which was an increase over recent years, when the same category ranged from about $450,000 to $530,000.
But the district has continually moved magnet staff positions among sections of its budget, making it difficult to track how they have fluctuated over time. Individual schools’ magnet allocations were cut by about $10,000, said Joe Snyder, school district budget director. Funding for all the school magnet coordinator positions has been eliminated except at Career Magnet Academy, Rysewyk said.
Rysewyk acknowledged that over the years, “allocations (for magnets) have varied without a whole lot of rhyme or reason to how that happened.”
Funding is one way of demonstrating priorities. They are also articulated in the district’s five-year strategic plans. For the first time in a decade, magnet programs as a whole aren’t mentioned in the district’s proposed new plan.
The strategic plan that began in 2009 acknowledged most Knox magnet schools were magnets “in name only,” and set goals for evaluating and improving them. They played a smaller role in the next plan, and aren’t in the draft new plan at all.
In September, a coalition of eight community organizations, including the League of Women Voters of Knox County and the Knox County branch of the NAACP, asked the school board to include 10 priorities in the strategic plan. One was “fully funding” magnet schools; according to the coalition’s calculations, magnet programs had been cut by 40 percent in the two preceding years.
Funding cuts prevent magnet schools from performing well enough to become truly magnetic, Butler said. Then it becomes easy to deem them unsuccessful because they don’t have lots of transfer applicants. It’s self-defeating: Magnet schools need the money to build flagship programs.
“If it’s the performing arts magnet, it should have the best performing arts instructors in the district,” Butler said. “If it’s a science magnet, it should have the best equipment and the best science teachers. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be good at other schools, but they shouldn’t be better.”
The community groups also asked the district to annually track and report information about individual magnet schools. They want the community to know about funding, transfers, students taking magnet classes who are not magnet “participants,” the racial and ethnic profiles of magnet participants, and the amount of “outside” funding magnet programs receive. (For example, Beaumont’s strong Parent Teacher Association has helped supplement the costs of arts programming this year, Boswell said. But not all schools have a parent population that can afford that.)
Morrell said district funding for Fulton’s expensive equipment, including a television studio and professional cameras, has been “fantastic.” Fulton is also one of only a handful of high schools in the state with an FM radio station, although that has been operating since the 1950’s.
Rysewyk insists magnets enjoy the support of the administration even without being emphasized in the strategic plan.
“I think at this point magnets that we have are good,” Rysewyk said. “Families are committed. Principals are committed. We’d always like to see more -- we’d like to have a waiting list at every school. And that’s not the case right now, but I don’t think we’ve missed. I think these are the right programs.”
