Chapter 5: MIS-Education at Woodson Middle School: Student Perceptions of a Magnet School Within a School

It has been argued that the most notable federal school intervention, the desegregation orders of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court ruling, was a combination of good intentions and interest convergence (Bell, 2004). Many districts across the nation employ(ed) busing and various school choice options to numerically desegregate schools (Rossell, 1990). Unfortunately, desegregation attempts played a role in resegregation. Today, Black and Latinx students attend largely segregated schools that provide inequitable and limited opportunities (Rosa, 2019; Vasquez Heilig et al., 2019). Parrillo (2015) and others have noted that school choice offers uneven results for achieving and maintaining desegregation (Bush et al., 2001; Davis, 2014; Ispa-Landa & Conwell, 2015). The magnet school movement was one of the first school choice options, achieved primarily through busing students from different neighborhoods and ethno-racial backgrounds to schools outside of their communities. When students travel great distances to school, they are less likely to be actively involved in all aspects of the school, participating only in curricular activities during the school day.