The Effects of Career Magnet Schools

This Brief is a distillation of a report on a major research study comparing graduates of career magnet programs to graduates of comprehensive high schools in a large metropolitan area. The career magnet programs we studied are located either within regular comprehensive high schools or combined with other magnet programs to fill up an entire building. Many of our conclusions are based on comparisons of a large number of students who had been randomly assigned—through a lottery admission process—either to magnet programs or to comprehensive high schools. Drawing on school records on over 9,000 students who attended 59 programs, the researchers interviewed 110 students who had applied to four different career magnet high schools, comparing lottery winners to those who lost the lottery and graduated from a comprehensive high school. Two further studies—four-hour interviews with 30 of the graduates and a lengthy interview with an additional 14 career magnet graduates— explored the lives and high school experiences of the respondents in an attempt to discover the reasons for the successes and failures of the career magnet high schools. The selection process and the study design. In this metropolitan area, every middle school student in the area is required to fill out an application for high school, using a form that makes applying to a magnet school as easy as possible. Each career magnet program can admit only one-sixth of its students from those with above-grade-level reading scores, and another one-sixth from those with below-grade-level reading scores. Finally, half the students have to be admitted by lottery, and separate lotteries are conducted for students with high, average, and low reading scores. We used the school district’s method of assigning students by lottery as the basis for our study. Thus, the students were randomly assigned to different treatments, and we took outcome measures after the students received the treatment. In all of our research, we studied only those students who were admitted by lottery to career magnet high schools and graduated from them, comparing them to lottery-losing applicants to the same schools who had graduated from comprehensive high schools. The students had chosen the same program, were in the same reading ability groups, and were matched in terms of income. Although not a perfect experiment, we consider the study as being based on an experimental model. This is the largest study ever done of an educational program using random assignment.