“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this.”

I was on a Zoom call with a national leader in the magnet school movement, someone who frequently serves as a consultant to districts working to establish or overhaul a magnet program. I had asked her about the enrollment practices at a magnet school she had founded in a large Southern school district.

“If the kids were good dancers, sometimes we just let them in,” she said.

She was confessing to violating her school district’s policy about fair enrollment for magnet schools. The school in question was a dance-oriented high school, but presumably the district had some sort of standard process or algorithm that determined who would be allowed in. The school leaders decided to ignore those requirements and simply “gift” enrollment to some of the better dancers who wanted to attend. Because this school was so coveted, their decision also meant that another student was denied enrollment every time a good dancer was admitted off the books.

Before you cast judgment on this educator, for good or ill, I want to point out that magnet schools have largely escaped scrutiny for their admissions practices. My organization, Available to All, released a report last year that evaluated state laws governing admissions practices at public schools. I was surprised to learn that not a single state has a robust law that puts any meaningful constraints on the enrollment practices of magnet schools. (In a small number of jurisdictions—including Florida, Delaware, and the District of Columbia—there are some limited open-enrollment constraints that apply to magnets, as well as other types of public schools.)

This stands in marked contrast with charter school laws, which spell out how admissions processes are to work and usually forbid enrollment preferences. Most charters are required to take applications from all comers and to hold a lottery if there are too many applicants. Charter laws also usually forbid the use of selective processes based on academic performance or demonstration of a specialized skill (e.g., an audition). Behind these laws is an assumption that, if it was legal to do so, school leaders might be tempted to cherry-pick their students.

What’s more, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) has taken a role in defining fair enrollment practices for charters. A few years ago, NAPCS published guidelines on when it is appropriate for charter schools to give low-income students a preferential chance at enrollment via a “weighted lottery.” While I disagree with their stance—it violates the principle that a public school is open to all members of the public on equal terms—I admire NAPCS for establishing a clear position and being transparent.

Later in that Zoom call, I asked my interlocutor if Magnet Schools of America, the magnet sector’s own national organization, publishes any guidance on admissions policies—guardrails to avoid abuses, or even parameters for what it takes to be called a magnet school. “No,” she said. “We don’t have anything like that.”

Without any constraints imposed by state laws or any professional standards that govern admissions processes, magnet schools could be considered the Wild West of public school admissions. As the dance story shows, magnet school leaders are flawed people, no different than the leaders of charter schools and traditional public schools. At times they will be tempted to bend or break the rules to benefit themselves or others. They might even do so for good reasons, like maintaining the culture of a dance-oriented school.

School leaders are public servants who should operate under legal and professional guardrails. If those guardrails don’t exist, policymakers need to provide them. They should also insist on consistent regulations for all types of public schools. Why should magnet schools operate under a laissez faire regime while charter schools are highly regulated and subject to strict state laws on admissions practices? It doesn’t make sense and fails to protect the rights of families.

Any attempt to establish standards for these schools will have to confront the reality that magnet schools can take many forms. Indeed, in many states or cities, they are not even called magnet schools. Take, for example, “options” schools in Seattle, “signature” schools in Kansas City, or “specialized schools” in New York City. All three are designed to pull in students from across the district, rather than having strict attendance zones, and are therefore consistent with the conventional definition of a magnet school.

That said, schools that fall in the magnet category can generally be classified into one of four buckets. Each type of magnet presents distinct opportunities for enrollment abuses.

1. Highly selective magnets: These schools target students with particular skills and use tests or auditions to determine who gets in. Schools like Lowell High School in San Francisco, Thomas Jefferson High School in Richmond, and the Bronx High School of Science in New York City have faced scrutiny in recent years. Critics charge that their highly competitive admissions processes are inherently unfair or even racist. My organization, which defends equal access to public schools, has a different take. These schools do indeed live up to the ideal, first articulated in Brown v. Board of Education, that public schools be “available to all,” because there is an open, transparent admissions process, and all students within the district have an equal opportunity to apply. The challenge for policymakers is to ensure that the admissions criteria actually reflect what it takes for a student to succeed at the school and aren’t being used as a gatekeeping mechanism to maintain a certain demographic profile.

2. Themed magnets aimed at racial balance: In the 1970s, voluntary desegregation efforts led to the creation of a new type of magnet school. The idea was to create themed schools that would draw widely from the district’s population (rather than from a strict geographic zone) to create a racially balanced student body. This type of magnet generally has a complicated set of enrollment preferences meant to ensure racial balance. Los Angeles, for example, uses a “points” system, and certain magnets have an explicit enrollment preference for white students, because they are under-represented at the school. A regime with explicit racial quotas is illegal for most districts. It is only allowed in Los Angeles because the district is still operating under a desegregation court order. (Hartford, Conn., was forced to abandon a similar quota system after being challenged in the courts.) Other districts attempt to promote racial balance with enrollment preferences based on proxy measures that correlate with race, such as income or zip code. The irony is that these magnets, designed to help low-income students of color, often end up giving enrollment preferences to wealthy white families.

3. Magnet-in-name-only: As Terry Grier, the former superintendent of Houston Independent School District, put it, “When I started in Houston, many of the district’s magnets were ‘magnet’ in name only. Several magnet schools were receiving as much as $3 million in extra local funding but didn’t serve a single student outside their attendance zone. Some were quasi-private schools.” These are traditional public schools with strict attendance zones, often serving the wealthier parts of town, that adopt the “magnet” moniker to qualify for additional funding that can boost their science or arts programming. In Houston, Grier implemented a requirement that, to qualify for magnet funding, a school had to admit at least 15 percent of its students from outside its attendance zone. Such a policy could be a model for the rest of the nation.

4. The rebranded magnet: This is a variation on a magnet-in-name-only school. A few years ago, Glassell Park Elementary School in Los Angeles was my family’s zoned public school. When I visited the school in 2019, the principal told me that Glassell Park was becoming a STEAM magnet. This was an effort by the school district to inject life into a struggling school, but it didn’t work. At Glassell Park, which still carries the magnet name, enrollment has fallen by 73 percent since 2000, and the school is struggling to keep even the students who are assigned by zone to attend it. In an integrated neighborhood, only 2 percent of the kids at Glassell Park Elementary are white. I suspect that dozens of inner-city schools that carry the “magnet” name are much like Glassell Park.

We need meaningful standards governing magnet school admissions. It starts with state laws, but it should also include an effort by magnet school leaders to establish professional standards at the national level. Such standards should be harmonized with the laws and regulations that govern charter schools. American families deserve to know how their public schools are selecting students, and leaders should be discouraged from relying on their own discretion to make enrollment decisions.

There’s nothing inherently unfair about a dance school admitting a committed dancer over someone with no background or interest in dance. But decisions about who is admitted to a public school (and who is turned away) should take place within legal limits and be subject to professional standards. It shouldn’t be up to an individual school leader. We need to protect both the principle that our public schools be “available to all” and the reality that certain public schools cater to a specialized subset of the public.

“Sometimes we just let them in” is no longer acceptable.

Tim DeRoche is the president and founder of Available to All, a nonpartisan watchdog that defends equal access to public schools. He is also the author of A Fine Line: How Most American Kids Are Kept Out of the Best Public Schools.