So I’m Australian, and here in Australia we have schools for gifted children, where admissions are based purely on standardised test results. Near the end of primary school you go to a special place to take a test, and the test is designed to measure logical thinking and mental flexibility rather than academic experience. And if you score highly, you go to a special school with smart students of all different backgrounds.
And I liked Spider-Man Homecoming in large part because Peter Parker goes to a “magnet school”, which I’m told is the American equivalent. And it doesn’t have any dumb jock types; the school bully is a little Indian brat with rich parents. It felt like a more modern take on high school tropes than all the high school movies where nerds wear bow ties that feel like the writer grew up in the 50s.
Anyway, half of My polycule says that magnet schools are all fake and only serve the rich. There’s no way a low income white boy from queens could make it into a gifted school in our world, based purely on academic achievement. I’m aware that the American system is less fair and money plays a much bigger role, but I thought there was at least a chance that a genius kid could beat the system and get into a good school with good grades.
Do magnet schools exist? Is it all just lies by the rich?
Well, I won’t deny that that site is 100% propaganda, I was just checking that they were still around. I don’t know how evidence that a poor person couldn’t go to a magnet school would be validated, but that doesn’t comport with my limited experience. I have been aware of children being at magnet schools whose parents didn’t strike me as particularly wealthy or influential. Mostly fringey-artsy types whose kids wanted to go to the artsy school, or perhaps whose parents wanted that. We weren’t close enough friends that if they’d been secretly wealthy I’d have known about it, necessarily, but they really don’t strike me as the type to be able to arrange a backdoor deal to get their kid into a magnet school.
IDRK, but my observations lead me to believe that it’s more similar to what elite colleges do, i.e. bring in enough rich kids to keep the gravy train running but also just enough poor kids to prove their equality bona fides, rather than being 100% a paper mill.