Available to All, a non-profit that advocates for “basic fairness and openness” when students seek admission to traditional, charter, and magnet public schools, has a lot to say about the last category. In “The Broken Promise of Brown v. Board of Ed,” analysts argue that magnets grant preference to privileged families and sabotage educational equity.

While its new report covers the whole country, analysts could have used Newark, New Jersey’s largest school district, as a microcosm for the nation.

According to new ratings, the highest-ranked public schools in Newark are two district magnets, Science Park High School and Technology High School; coming in third is Essex County’s magnet school, the Donald M. Payne Sr. School of Technology. (The fourth is North Star Academy, a public charter that is not a magnet and chooses students through a lottery.)

Newark Superintendent Roger Leon has high hopes for magnet schools, where students vastly outperform traditional district schools. In fact, he’s cited plans to create elementary schools modeled after magnets that then feed into high school magnets like Science Park and Technology High, as well as reclassify current schools as magnets. In 2020 he told TAPinto, ““It’s creating a system that says we are fair to everybody,” promising that by 2025 there will be magnet elementary schools in every ward that will feed into magnet high schools. Every Newark student in a magnet school!

Yet how does one push forward with that plan (delayed, of course, by the pandemic) when, by their very nature, magnet schools have selective admissions criteria? In fact, Available to All points to magnet schools as “intentionally” putting low-income children of color at a disadvantage in accessing a high-quality education.

For instance, Science Park, the top-rated Newark high school, describes its admissions process like this:

The Science Park High School Board of Admissions is seeking to recruit top Newark scholars who are committed to academic excellence in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Students should have solid character, well-rounded interests, intellectual curiosity, and a desire to better our school and the greater Newark community. 

In order to get in you have to take an admissions test and submit exemplary transcripts and attendance records.

Let’s compare Science Park and a traditional district school less than a mile away, Central High School:

• At Science Park, 10.3% of students are white, 48% are Hispanic, 38% are Black, and 61% are economically-disadvantaged..
• At Central High, 1 percent are white, 24% are Hispanic, 72% are Black, and 78% are economically-disadvantaged.
• At Science Park, 86% of students are proficient in reading and 69% are proficient in math.
• At Central High, 16% of students are proficient in reading and the state redacts the math proficiency numbers because they’re so low.
• At Science Park, average SAT scores are 564 in reading and 562 in math.
• At Central High, average SAT scores are 397 in reading and 372 in math.
• At Science Park there are 31 AP course to choose from. At Central High there are 9.
• At Science Park, the graduation rate is 98%. At Central High it is 86%.
• At Science Park, the chronic absenteeism rate is 10%. At Central High it’s 36%.

It’s easy to understand Leon’s fondness for magnet schools; he is a graduate of Science Park High School himself. Yet how does one reconcile that essential contradiction of magnet’s selectivity with Leon’s declaration of inclusivity?

It is a mystery.