Mayor Adams, Chancellor Banks to create federally funded magnet high schools
Mayor Eric Adams has announced that the city’s education department will fund six magnet high schools through two federal grants totaling nearly $30 million.
“Since the start of our administration, we have kept schools safe and open, introduced a comprehensive approach to supporting students with dyslexia, and delivered strong growth in students’ test scores,” said Adams in a statement.
Magnet schools center “career-connected learning” with “rigorous” instruction for students, said the city, and were selected based on their need for assistance. The federal education funds are from the U.S Department of Education (DOE) Magnet Schools Assistance program and will support the schools’ development over the next five years.
The selected schools are in the Bronx and Manhattan: the Laboratory School of Finance and Technology, High School for Teaching and the Professions, Bronx High School for the Visual Arts, Esperanza Preparatory Academy, City College Academy of the Arts, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis High School.
According to the National Association of Magnet and Theme-Based Schools, magnet schools cropped up in the 1960s in the U.S. in response to racially segregated schools. Some of these “street academies” emphasized core curriculum along with Black history, the Civil Rights Movement, and community needs. Harlem Prep, founded by the New York Urban League in 1967, became one of these schools. By 1971, a school following the same model in Texas was the first to start referring to them as “magnet schools” because it attracted students from all walks of life. As more schools were mandated to desegregate, magnet schools grew in popularity.
While some education advocates applauded the move, there were still reservations when it came to how the schools would benefit students.
According to Zakiyah Ansari, director of the New York State Alliance for Quality Education Advocacy, magnet schools are essentially federal specialized schools that use a lottery system for entry and not always an exam, which could help boost Black and brown enrollment numbers in high schools—an issue that has historically been a point of contention between racial groups in the city.
Ansari was still skeptical about the impacts of the mayor’s budget cuts to education and public schools that he has largely attributed to the asylum seeker costs and other factors. “It’s great you got funding from the federal government, but you spent the last three years cutting budgets and we’ve been fighting against you for our New York City public schools, magnet or not,” said Ansari. “More schools funded by grants. Eventually, the funding will end.”
Fiona Sifontes, a certified paralegal, education advocate, and C.E.O of NY Advocates 4 Kids, Inc. whose focus is on supporting students with learning disabilities or who require an Individualized Education Program (IEP) to advance, said she wonders if magnet schools are a good environment for her type of students when plenty are already struggling to keep up with some of the budget cuts that have been made.
Sifontes is also familiar with some of the selected schools that will get the funding. Similarly to Ansari, she worried about the barrier to entry for students with different needs. Her son is an IEP student of color who took the exam for a gifted and talented program in elementary school and failed by five points, she said.
“I do have graduates that graduated from a few of those schools. They’re very good schools. However, not every student gets into these schools and then what happens to the students that don’t get accepted?” said Sifontes.
Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member and writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
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