Building a constituency for racial integration: Chicago's magnet schools and the prehistory of school choice

Abstract

Chicago's magnet schools were one of the nation's earliest experiments in choice-driven school desegregation, originating among civil rights advocates and academic education experts in the 1960s and appearing at specific sites in Chicago's urban landscape during the 1970s. The specific concerns that motivated the creation of magnet schools during the civil rights era-desegregating schools and arresting white flight-were decisively wedded to notions of parental choice, academic selectivity, and urban revitalization. While magnet schools enacted innovative curricula in self-consciously multicultural spaces, their scarcity, combined with their function as a spur to middle-class urbanism, ratified new regimes of inequality in urban education. This article frames magnet schools' engineered success as a necessary prehistory for the rise of educational choice-and-accountability reforms later in the twentieth century.