By Dr. Baron R. Davis, Superintendent in Residence, MSA
Education has been preparing students for “the future” for as long as I have been in it, which is long enough to notice that the future keeps refusing to stay in the future. We hold conferences. We adopt strategic plans. We hang “future-ready” on a banner in the front hall. And all the while, the future we keep promising to get ready for has quietly moved in, unpacked its boxes, and started rearranging the furniture. It is not a distant shore. It is already here, and it arrived faster than our systems were built to navigate it. The World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, technological and economic change will create roughly 170 million new jobs while displacing about 92 million, and that nearly four in ten of the core skills workers rely on today will have transformed. The students in our buildings this fall will graduate directly into that churn. They will not inherit the economy we were trained to prepare students for. They will inherit the one already reorganizing itself around them.
Here is the uncomfortable part. While the world outside our walls is changing at the speed of a Cerebras CS-3 chip, the basic architecture of school is changing at the speed of a committee formed to study whether it should. Students feel that gap. In Gallup’s Voices of Gen Z study, fewer than two in ten middle and high schoolers strongly agreed that what they were learning felt important, interesting, or aligned with their talents, and more than half said they rarely got to do schoolwork connected to their interests. That is not a motivation problem inside our children. It is a design problem inside our institutions. When we organize learning around coverage and compliance rather than relevance and purpose, disengagement is not a surprise. It is the predictable output of the system we built.
The encouraging news is that the gap is movable. In the most recent wave of that same study, every measure of student engagement reached its highest level yet, and the largest gains came precisely where students were given work connected to their interests and strengths. That single finding ought to focus the entire field, because it points to a design principle we already know how to execute: when learning is relevant, students show up. And the students who are most engaged are several times more likely to say they feel
prepared for the future. Engagement and readiness are not separate goals. They are the same goal approached from two directions.
This is where magnet schools should stop being modest. For fifty years, we have described magnets as schools of choice with a theme, and for too many of those years we have treated the theme the way a restaurant treats a sprig of parsley: technically present, strictly decorative, and removed before anyone actually eats. A banner in the lobby. A word in the name. A 3D printer that lives in a closet and gets wheeled out when the board visits. That framing sells the field short. A magnet theme, designed well, is not garnish. It is a strategic design tool: a coherent organizing logic that connects a student’s interest to rigorous content, authentic skills, the surrounding community, and a future that students can actually picture themselves in.
And this is not a niche corner of public education. With more than 4,300 magnet schools now serving roughly one in every fifteen public school students (nearly three and a half million children), magnets are the largest and oldest form of public school choice in America. Magnet schools are not waiting for permission to lead. They already have the scale, the history, and the design DNA to do it.
What a strong theme does is impose intentionality. It forces a school to answer a question most schools never ask out loud: What is this school for, and what kind of learner are we trying to grow? Once school leaders answer that honestly – whether the answer is engineering and design, the arts, computer science, environmental science, or global studies – every other decision gains coherence. Curriculum stops being a list of disconnected courses and becomes a through-line. Partnerships with employers, universities, and civic institutions stop being field trips and become the point. The skills the labor market is begging for like critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and the capacity to work across differences, stop being slogans on a poster and become the daily practice of the building.
That skill of working across differences deserves emphasis because it is where a well-designed magnet carries an advantage the rest of the choice landscape cannot easily match. Consider that no employer in the history of employment has ever hired someone and asked them to sit in rows, stay quiet, and work strictly alone, and yet that remains the default operating system of a remarkable number of classrooms. A compelling theme does something different. It has the potential to pull students from across an entire district – that’s different neighborhoods, different needs, different lived experiences – into a shared rigorous learning environment. The research on strong magnet schools is consistent: students who learn and solve problems in that kind of environment build stronger critical thinking, sharper perspective-taking, and the habit of collaborating productively with people who see the world differently than they do. In an economy that
will ask graduates to work on teams that span geography, discipline, and experience, that is not a soft benefit. It is direct workforce preparation.
But I want to be honest with my colleagues about the condition attached to that claim, because the field is not served by overstating it. These outcomes follow from intentional design, not from the magnet label. A theme that exists mainly on paper or that pulls only a narrow slice of the community in will not produce work-ready graduates. The advantage is real, but it is something we build on purpose. It does not happen by accident, and we do ourselves no favors pretending it does.
For those of us who lead this work, the moment calls for a few concrete design commitments:
The future our students are inheriting is not waiting for our institutions to feel ready, and it is conspicuously uninterested in our strategic-planning timelines. It is already here, reorganizing work, learning, and human connection in real time. Public education needs models built to respond to those conditions — relevant, coherent, connected, and unafraid of change. We do not need to invent that model. We have been building it for half a century. The task now is to stop treating magnet design as an accessory and start treating it as what it is: one of the most powerful and proven design tools public education has for preparing students for a future that has already arrived. We can keep studying the question. Or we can design the answer.
Selected sources
World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025 · Gallup & Walton Family Foundation, Voices of Gen Z (2024 and 2025 waves) · Magnet Schools of America, A Snapshot of Magnet Schools in America · peer-reviewed research syntheses on magnet school student outcomes · RAND Corporation (2025) and Center for Democracy & Technology (2025) on AI use in K–12 schools.
Dr. Baron Davis is founder and CEO of The Noegenesis Group and the former superintendent of Richland School District Two in Columbia, South Carolina, where he helped design magnet
programs spanning research and design, the arts, and computer science. His work centers on the conviction that connection precedes curriculum.
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