The Dothan City School Board voted unanimously earlier this month to change the procedure used to enroll students in the city’s two magnet schools, Heard and Montana. Beginning next school year, students will be accepted based on their grades and discipline. Of those who apply, the top students are accepted until the schools’ slots are filled.
That’s radically different from the method used now. Today, students who hope for a slot in a magnet school are selected by lottery. While that is an objective approach when there isn’t room for everyone, it’s far less effective if the goal is to create a school with higher expectations of its students.
The school board’s newly adopted approach is far better. Students who are drawn to a magnet school because of special curricula or other features not available in other schools should succeed on their own merit, not because of random chance.
Meanwhile, school officials can learn a great deal over time by studying what components of a magnet school experience help students learn better – or, at least, lead to better scores on standardize tests broadly accepted as a measurement of school effectiveness.
Those components could then be applied throughout the school system to help recreate the success of magnet schools.
What’s obvious today is that Dothan’s city schools are doing a lot of things right. Whether students are selected for magnet school by lottery or by academic ranking, it’s clear that the school system is producing far more students who could qualify for magnet school than there are slots to accommodate them.
As public school problems go, that’s a good one to have.
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