Carranza weighs magnet changes
Rethinking funding, selection for popular schools has proved touchy
Houston ISD Superintendent Richard Carranza has signaled that he soon might revisit the topic of changing the way magnet schools are funded and how they accept students.
Carranza said at an education summit last week that the district may rethink where magnet programs are located as well as the lottery and audition systems through which students are accepted at such schools.
“I’m not anti-magnet,” said Carranza, now in his second year. “But I’m a very big proponent of thoughtfully implementing programs and structures that support students.”
Carranza spoke last week at a summit sponsored by Children at Risk.
The district’s 121 magnet programs and schools have become an increasingly touchy subject as their prevalence has grown, and the past several HISD administrations have tried to make changes, to little avail.
Proponents of magnet schools point to
their national rankings and their students’ strong showing on state tests as reasons to leave them untouched. Carnegie Vanguard High, for example, was ranked as the eighthbest public school in the country by U.S. News and World Report this year, and DeBakey High School for Health Professions was ranked as the 18th best nationwide.
‘A little scary’
Rachel Bohenick, who teachers pre-AP English and art at Carnegie Vanguard, said she’s not thrilled that magnet programs are facing scrutiny again.
“It’s always a little scary to hear them talk about changing our funding or changing the way we look at magnet programs, but I do have positive feelings about the superintendent so far,” Bohenick said. “I think he values teachers and values our program. He’s said so. He’s been here to visit it; he’s done things to make us feel that he cares about the program; and he’s not out to get the program.”
But critics say the magnet schools have decimated neighborhood schools in poor, minority communities by drawing away top students and do not reflect the district’s racial and economic demographics.
While the district’s magnet schools tend to be more diverse than neighborhood schools, they enroll a higher proportion of white and Asian students. Only 8 percent of HISD’s students are white, according to Texas Education Agency data, yet whites account for about 36 percent of students at Carnegie Vanguard High. At DeBakey High, about 50 percent of the students are of Asian heritage, while only 4.7 percent of students districtwide belong to that ethnic group.
The district’s demographics don’t match those of the city overall, in large part because more affluent white families have opted to send their children to private schools or to other districts.
Equitable treatment
Carranza has previously floated the idea of making changes to the magnet school program. In May, he faced a backlash when he proposed cutting almost all of the extra funding that magnet programs receive per student.
DeBakey High School would have gone from receiving $1,125 per student in additional funds in 20162017 to zero by 2018-2019. Similarly, Carnegie Vanguard High would have gone from receiving $410 per student in additional magnet-school dollars to zero over the same time period.
Carranza said at the Nov. 8 summit that schools with higher needs should get more money than those that serve less-vulnerable populations.
“You cannot treat systems and communities equally. You must, by definition, treat them equitably,” he said. “That becomes a politically loaded question, because you’re automatically taking from me to give to them. It becomes a zero-sum game.”
The superintendent did not propose any specific changes last week, but said he hoped to have a more enlightened conversation about magnet schools and school choice over the coming months.
Sue Deigaard, who was elected last week to the Houston ISD Board of Education’s District V seat, said she is open to discussing how the district’s magnet system currently works and could be improved. In the past, she said, she’s been disappointed by districtled magnet reviews that seemed to accomplish little and that failed to engage families and community members.
“How do we sunset programs? How do we create new programs? How do we create equity? I think all those things need to be looked at to make sure we’re doing the best thing for students,” Deigaard said. “The No. 1 thing is collaborative input. Anything that is done moving forward, we need to be making sure we have community input and parents have input throughout the district. That’s the only way to get public buy-in, to build that public trust. Otherwise, it will feel imposed.”