[MooreteP]

Thank you for this post.

As a public school teacher in an area with a raft of "magnet" schools, I empathize with your feelings.

Schools should be axes of their communities, blending young citizens with each other in a host of cooperative activities such as music, theater, sports, community service activities, as well as the classroom.

Going back to Brown vs. the Board of Education, those students just wanted to go to the school in their local community. The upshot of this decision ended up creating the opposite effect. Students were bussed to schools almost an hour away from their homes, effectively removing them from the extracurricular activities that would weave a strong community fabric.

Here in Connecticut, we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars duplicating school facilities that diffuse our communities and undermine the local school's function as a center of organization to build a greater whole.

That being said, our team has incorporated as a non-profit and accept students from any of our surrounding schools, including magnet and technical schools. We go with what we got.

Magnet schools polarize communities.

"A Sky Without Stars" is an excellent phrase to describe this issue and the OP is spot on.

I take solace and do FIRST because it provides a path to ameliorate what I believe is the deleterious effect of these "magnet" schools.