Big voice for CMS magnets

Only about 1 in 8 students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools attend magnets. But from the turnout at four public forums on student assignment, you might think it was the other way around.

The discussion group on magnets was so consistently in demand that officials joked about charging admission. Last night at Hopewell High, a neighborhood school in Huntersville, 90 of approximately 200 people squeezed into the room where magnets were discussed. That compares with 22 who gathered to talk about schools close to home. (Read CMS summaries of the first three forums here; the Hopewell notes will be posted soon).

Magnet families have a reputation for being passionate and organized. They've already prepared spreadsheets for the school board to argue their case that the cost of magnets is relatively low, and the benefits great.

There's another factor at work: Nothing mobilizes a crowd like anger. And magnet families got a big poke in the eye this spring, with a cost-cutting move that eliminates neighborhood bus stops for 11 popular magnets in the coming year. CMS heard plenty of complaints about that at the forums.

But officials have also heard from people who worry that the success of magnets comes at the expense of neighborhood schools. For instance: Magnets with admission requirements have seen test scores rise, while the weaker students land in neighborhood schools.

I saw both sides of that coin when I recently spent time at Bishop Spaugh Academy, a low-performing neighborhood middle school on Charlotte's west side. Teachers there used magnet admission to motivate kids to work for success. Pass your eighth-grade exams, they told students, and you can get into Phillip O. Berry Academy of Technology or Harding's IB and math/science programs.

This year Spaugh saw gains in students passing reading, math and science exams -- clearly a good result for a neighborhood school.

But the eighth-grade promotion program indicated that virtually every student who passed all exams was also admitted to a magnet. That means the roughly three-quarters who failed one or more subject will head to West Meck or West Charlotte, neighborhood high schools also working hard to boost performance.

That's the challenge, as the board goes into this afternoon's four-hour meeting to set priorities. There's strong agreement that all student assignment policies should boost academic success. Figuring out how to make that work for all schools won't be easy.

(Note if you're going: It's from 1-5 p.m. today at the Education Center, 701 E. Martin Luther King Blvd., not at the Government Center where previous sessions have been.)