And there lies the ugly truth. Parents with means will be able to send their gifted children to better and safer schools leaving those without means high and dry.
This is exactly why I support standardized testing and placement based scores in public schools. This way all high acedemic potential children have a chance at getting an appropriate primary and secondary education.
Ditto.
There has been a similar move in our district's much less exclusive magnet programs, at least at the middle school level. It doesn't look like they are stupid enough to try it at the high school level, but time will tell. I am so glad that my kids are old enough to have missed this particular bit of progress. The district essentially got rid of the assessment and minimum GPA requirements for entry to the middle school magnet programs. In our case, the requirements at the middle school level were quite low with students only needing 70% on the magnet assessment and no grades lower than a C in core classes. Even so, there were kids every year who couldn't hack it and were returned to their home schools, albeit too late to benefit a qualified student. At my kids' middle school magnet program, there used to be about 300 students left on the waitlist after the top 20 or so made it in on "priority" based on assessments scores and then the first 100 or so made in it based on a lottery. The top magnet students were always the star students at the school even though they only constituted 25-30 percent of the student population and raised the reputation of the school considerably. With removal of all requirements for entry for this past school year, there were about 700 students on the waitlist and the caliber of the magnet students are no longer distinguishable from the general population. Some of the other middle school magnet programs were not as rigorous but I am not sure whether any of them will survive in a decade as is. At least a few of the high ability students who did not make it in based on this new lottery either moved or chose private schools.
