The Attraction of Magnet Schools: Evidence from Embedded Lotteries in School Assignment

Abstract

Magnet schools provide innovative curricula designed to attract students from other schools within a school district, typically with the joint goals of diversifying enrollment and boosting achievement. Measuring the impact of attending a magnet school is challenging because students choose to apply and schools have priorities over types of students. Moreover, magnet schools may influence non-cognitive skill formation that is not well-reflected in test scores. This study estimates the causal impact of attending a magnet school on student outcomes by leveraging exogenous variation arising from tie breakers embedded in a centralized school assignment mechanism. Using a rich set of administrative data from a large school district, we find suggestive evidence that attending a magnet school led to higher performance in mathematics and attending non-language immersion magnet schools increased students' reading scores.  Student engagement was significantly higher, as measured through absenteeism and on-time progress rates.  Further, students were significantly less likely to change schools when attending a magnet.  These results provide robust evidence that magnet schools---a typically understudied school choice option---can benefit student learning and increase student engagement while enabling the system to achieve its goals of promoting racial and socioeconomic balance through school choice.

Keywords: Magnet schools, non-cognitive outcomes, student achievement, school assignment