Yesterday NJ Education Report looked at 101.5’s lists of New Jersey’s best and worst schools. Another day, another ranking, as today Advance Media has school rankings based on the the Department of Education’s own list, the first one it has released in five years. (The releases stopped during the pandemic. The DOE did not respond to questions asking why ratings were not released for 2018-2019.)

To no one’s surprise, the list is dominated by schools with rigorous admissions criteria that cream off top-performing students. In New Jersey, these are called “magnet schools.”

Example: the top school on today’s list is High Technology High School, part of Monmouth County’s “Vocational School District.” Each of NJ’s 21 counties has a county-run school district which oversees schools for students with disabilities and those who want to take courses in cosmetology or automotive repair. But most counties also offer, as part of their vocational offerings, what we call “magnet schools.”

How do  you get your kid into High Tech High? First, you have to be a Monmouth County resident, which is fair. Then your kid goes through the admissions process and is ranked based on these criteria:

According to  High Tech High, admissions gets more and more competitive each year:

Seventy-five students are selected each year from a pool of over three hundred outstanding applicants. These students represent a cross-section of students from 45+ school districts in Monmouth County, generating a culturally diverse, as well as gender and racially balanced environment.

Is that true? Is the student body really a culturally and racially balanced cross-section of students with an even split between boys and girls?

Not according to the Department of Education’s School Performance Report for the school:

• 30% of student are female and 70% are male.
• 1.8% are economically-disadvantaged and no one is an English Language Learner.
• 33% are white. 58% are Asian, 4% are Hispanic, and 1% are Black.

But perhaps that’s a representative cross-section of Monmouth County?

Not so much: 78% of Monmouth County residents are white, 10% are Hispanic, 7% are Black, and 5% are Asian. I can’t find male/female break-downs but I’m betting more than 30% of school-age children are female. In other words, rather than magnets acting as a remedy to transcend geographically-determined, heavily-segregated district assignments (as argued in this lawsuit), our magnet schools exacerbate segregation, with High Tech High just one example.

This is par for the course with NJ magnet schools: according to nj.com’s list, of the top 20 schools in the state 17 are Vocational School District magnets and 3 are magnets within school districts, two in Jersey City and one in Orange. They also tend to cluster in our wealthier counties: Bergen, Monmouth, Somerset, etc. Among the top 50 schools in the state, 27 are magnets.

Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. Maybe magnet schools are a terrific way to attract high-income families to public schools and brighten the shine of our state school system.

But let’s not pretend they promote equity and opportunity for most New Jersey students.