The Catch-22 With Magnet Schools

Discipline

I spent my last two years of high school in the suburbs of Chicago. Every morning at 5 am, I left the house in time for a 6: 50 am train. Keep in mind, the train was in the Loop and I lived in the south side of Chicago. Therefore, half of my commute was just trying to get downtown to get to the other half of my commute.

Like most college prep schools – you get a massive workload and read tons of books you will probably never pick up again. Then, there are the required after school activities (like sports).

This is great. If you live in the suburbs. For where I lived,  it was a nightmare. Getting home before 6 was a godsend – on a normal day. If I had activities like soccer practice, I was lucky to get home by 8.

Long commutes take a lot out of you. It seems like you can never get enough rest. Half the time you are running on adrenaline and the other half you are running on coffee and No-doz. One can point out that people do this every day for work and raise kids or have 12 hour days for jobs. It’s tough to do the equivalent when you are 16 year old high school junior because you have to make decisions about your time that your peers do not.

This is because they probably don’t have to worry about a 2 1/2 hour commute.

It becomes the norm to negotiate simple stuff like catching up on sleep on the train or reading the unequivocally boring Middlemarch so you can write a 3 page reading response later.  Or, take chances on waking up at midnight to finish a paper even though you know the broken rest will haunt you because you’ll barely be able to stay awake in Discrete Math.

Time is much more limited (and hard to manage) when you are going to a high school that’s far from home – even if it is in the same state.

This is probably no different from the life of student athletes – so what am I complaining about? Actually, I’m not. However, when you are living life like a student athlete every day (and perhaps, beyond) when you are not one – you get a whole new perspective on work ethic and discipline. When parents opt to send their kids to schools outside of their communities, there are various opportunity costs (and different ROI on such costs).

It may seem small to choose between 8 hours of sleep and a good education, but ponder this: how’s a sleepy and cranky brain going to respond to 8 hours of classes on 4 hours of sleep?

The Intelligence Factor

Parents bundling up all their “high-potential” kids and bussing them out to the suburbs, magnet schools or special  gifted programs  end up removing them from the general population of local students. Sometimes, they are removed from their own neighborhoods.

Parents think this is great. Their kids get to be surrounded with their like-minded ilk. Those “dumb” public school kids won’t influence them for the worse. They’re being put some place where they’ll be challenged. It’s all about protecting the smart, talented students from the less than average pupils.

God forbid.

Yet, what about the students now dealing with the swirling academic morass in their own schools? If you are supposedly learning from different types of people – how much better off are these kids who have their other “smarter” peers removed from the education pool?

Frankly, I have no idea. I don’t know what my life would have been like if I had gone to my local high school. My mother insists that it would have been starkly different.

Perhaps so.

A part of me wonders, however, if it would have been similar to my sister’s. She gets to enjoy the benefits of a local high school. She has way more time to engage in activities she likes doing. She’s fostering a consistency with her peers and within her academic career.

She also gets more sleep.

Cultural Gaps & Community

In short, my high school was chock full of white kids. All the Black and Hispanic kids you could count on one hand. The elephant in the room: the cultural gap. I could say that there was also a race gap. In reality, I probably have more in common with a white kid who grew up in Chicago than a black girl who lived in Wilmette all her life. In hindsight, it wasn’t an issue of race diversity, I could care less about that. People of color are used to being taken out of their own “familiar” surroundings and being told it was “good for them.”

From my perspective, it’s always been the case that the “privileged” (read: wealthy) are the least comfortable with difference. On the other hand, people of color have to get used to “differences” because someone’s always pointing it out to them.

As I mentioned before, the opportunity costs vary.  Just because you are wealthy doesn’t mean you are exposed to more opportunities – just different ones. That is the fundamental connection. I’m walking the fine line of generalizing, but I’ll say that opportunities for the wealthy don’t focus on the idea of “otherness” but how much more like everyone else they are (such as being well connected and wealthy). My opportunities came through because my high school was looking to “brown up” its population. Thus, focusing on my otherness and how much I was unlike everyone else already there.

Also, this is a case of navigating cultural and socioeconomic diversity.  I’m not sure how much my high school peers learned from me, but past conversations remind me that they only seem to glean that I was the Black girl who lived in the vast wilderness of Chicago.

Basically, it leads me to wonder about the two way connection that comes with exposure. I learned loads from my classmates. Yet, I wonder how much they were learning from me. Should it matter? Is it even important as long as someone (specifically – me) is getting something out of it? How valuable is exposure for the kids “suffering” from the cultural homogeny schools seek to break up?

The Token Adversity Complex

The usual expectation that crops up when kids of color are in all white environments is the undertone of racism they may experience. Racism in academic environments is a touchy subject. And, as a whole, undermines the point of exposing students of color to the trappings of high society academia.

One of the worst things a student can experience is when teachers make it plainly obvious they don’t think you belong in their academic community. It takes all of the flavor out of a new (and what should otherwise be an engaging) experience.