From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberalism: Class, Choice, and Magnet Schools in Post–Civil Rights Chicago

• In Event: Desegregation and the Struggle for Equitable Education

Abstract

The paper offers a history of Chicago’s magnet schools, one of the nation’s earliest experiments in choice-driven school desegregation. The paper begins with the origin of the magnet concept among civil rights advocates and academic educationists in the 1960s, shifting to a story of implementation at specific sites in Chicago’s urban landscape during the following decades. The paper argues that the unique concerns that motivated the creation of magnet schools during the civil rights era—desegregating schools and arresting white flight—were gradually and decisively wedded to notions of parental choice and academic selectivity. The perceived success of magnets whetted urban administrative appetites for more models based on choice, which a range of reforms began to fulfill by century’s end.

Author

• Nicholas James Kryczka, University of Chicago