Study Highlights Benefits, Shortcomings of Magnet Programs

By Debra Viadero

Schools may help with desegregation, but they also can "cream off" better-educated, more affluent families, concludes a study that takes a close look at long-established programs in Cincinnati and St. Louis.

Vanderbilt University researchers Claire Smrekar and Ellen Goldring spent three years visiting magnet and nonmagnet elementary schools in both cities. They interviewed parents and teachers and surveyed thousands of students and their families for a new book, School Choice in Urban America , which was released last month by Teachers College Press.

But their findings may have as much to say about the school choice movement of the 1990s as they do about magnet schools, which developed in the 1970s as an...