Traditional schools blurring district lines

In Prince William County, one in 10 students go to a non-neighborhood high school, enrolling in “specialty programs” such as performing arts or International Baccalaureate. These programs, created in the 1990s, were never associated with racial diversity, school officials said.

Montgomery still has magnet programs, which are competitive and offer enrichment to a wide applicant pool. Many were established in schools with dwindling enrollment or a more racially isolated population.

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The county’s two high school consortia — which include eight of its 25 high schools — are not considered magnets. Families who live in the two designated areas rank their high school choices when children are in eighth grade. Admission is largely determined by interest and available space. A lottery is used for schools that are oversubscribed.

Creating this system enabled the school board to avoid the contentious process of redrawing boundaries as new schools were opening. But the board also cited research that shows students perform better when they choose their own course of study.

Early goals of the program included decreasing racial and economic isolation in parts of the county most affected by poverty and immigration. The Northeast Consortium, which consists of Blake, Paint Branch and Springbrook high schools, was started in 1998 with help from a federal desegregation grant for magnet schools. But soon after it got underway, a ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals limited Montgomery’s ability to use race as a factor in school transfers.

The Down County Consortium, which includes Blair, Einstein, Kennedy, Northwood, and Wheaton high schools, was developed in 2004. Soon afterward, the school board tweaked the lottery for oversubscribed schools to include socioeconomic status as a factor in admission.

But a 2008 report by the county’s Office of Legislative Oversight found that as county demographics have shifted, poverty rates have climbed and the share of white students in all of the consortium schools has fallen.

Now school officials focus almost entirely on other benefits of choice programs, such as increasing student engagement and parent satisfaction.

Some civil rights advocates worry that as schools become less economically and racially diverse, students suffer. Research shows that racially isolated or overwhelmingly poor schools tend to have higher teacher turnover, a less-rigorous curriculum and lower academic achievement.

Magnet Schools of America, a Washington-based advocacy group that counts more than 2,000 magnet schools nationwide, promotes diversity as a key advantage of what it calls “the original school choice.” The federal government spends $100 million a year to help establish magnet schools with plans for increasing diversity.

Many of today’s school choice advocates have a different view: They say schools with a high number of poor or minority children don’t have to be inferior.

Urban charter schools often focus on the specific needs of disadvantaged students rather than trying to appeal to the desires of the middle class.

In Montgomery, rather than busing students from rich neighborhoods in the west to poorer neighborhoods in the east, officials have invested more heavily in poor schools and won recognition for narrowing achievement gaps.

At Wheaton, which has 1,200 students, 80 percent of students come from families poor enough to have qualified at some point for meal subsidies. That makes it the county’s poorest high school.

On many measures, Wheaton still lags far behind the academic powerhouses in western Montgomery known as the “W-schools” — Whitman, Wootton, Walter Johnson and Winston Churchill high schools.

But Lowndes, the Wheaton High principal, said the competition created through the consortium is helping improve the school and turn around a reputation for lagging achievement that has sent some neighborhood families in search of alternatives.

Next fall, Wheaton will offer new, competitive biomedical and engineering programs in an effort to lure more advanced students.

“Parents look at SAT scores and where kids go to college and what type of scholarship money they are getting,” Lowndes said. “It makes you constantly push to get better.”