This is not unexpected. If it is typical of Magnet schools, then it will be whiter and richer than the comprehensive schools, and less wealthy and less white than the charter schools. The layering, for a given geographic area, is quite often comprehensive → magnet → Charter → private. As you go to the left, income drops and people of color increase, as you go to the right, income rises and people of color decrease.
If you look closer, separating into Black, Hispanic, Asian instead of deceptively lumping together all “non-white” then the contrast becomes far more stark - because I can pretty much guarantee that your magnet school has far more Asians than the comprehensive school, which in turn has far more Black students.
This is again completely expected and by design. We know, it’s abundantly documented, that poor people score lower on entrance exams and performance tests. The magnet/charter system selects against the poor, segregating the children of the poor by the simple expedient of testing. Rich people of color aren’t discriminated against under such systems so the architects - the people supplying you with the false information about how it works - won’t be held responsible for sustaining and increasing racism in the educational system. They aren’t racially discriminating, they are economically discriminating, and the fact that this is driving racist 3rd-order effects can be ignored.
Any system that works as you’ve described is slanted to give a higher quality education to those that need it the least, and a lower quality education to those who could otherwise be lifted out of poverty and permitted to make a better life for their own children.
Hundreds of studies have been done, and the most valid predictor of children’s academic performance and test scores is parental income. It’s not parental intelligence, it’s not parental involvement, it’s not race or creed or nationality, it’s parental income - all those things can be pointed to, but none of them correlate to the degree that parental income does.
Part of how this system works is it co-opts the natural and admirable desire that you and I have to do the best we can by our children. You didn’t send your child to a magnet school because it’s worse than the comprehensive school, you sent them there because it’s better. You know this is true, you just didn’t recognize the income/test score connection until now.
We are complicit. That doesn’t mean that we should support and defend the system, or try to decrease the quality of our children’s education, it means we should try to improve the system, and increase the quality of education available to everyone else’s children. Lift up, instead of passively assisting in the dragging down or the poor.
