Magnet School

In the U.S. education system, magnet schools are public schools with specialized courses or curricula. "Magnet" refers to how the schools draw students from across the normal boundaries defined by authorities (usually school boards) as school zones that feed into certain schools.

There are magnet schools at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. In the United States, where education is decentralized, some magnet schools are established by school districts and draw only from the district, while others are set up by state governments and may draw from multiple districts. Other magnet programs are within comprehensive schools, as is the case with several "schools within a school". In large urban areas, several magnet schools with different specializations may be combined into a single "center", such as Skyline High School in Dallas.

Other countries have similar types of schools, such as specialist schools in England. The majority of these are academically selective. Other schools are built around elite-sporting programs or teach agricultural skills such as farming or animal breeding.

Magnet schools emerged in the United States in the 1970s as one means of remedying racial segregation in public schools, and they were written into law in Section 5301 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Authorization. Demographic trends following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court decision revealed a pattern later characterized as white flight, the hypersegregation of blacks and whites, as the latter moved to the suburbs.

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