On Leadership is a column by MSA Superintendent-in-Residence Dr. Baron R. Davis
School choice is expanding across America. The U.S. Department of Education now describes education choice as covering a range of options: magnet and charter schools, open enrollment, private schools, homeschooling, and other approaches.
But as educators debate where students should attend school, I believe public education leaders need to ask a more important question: What are students actually being given the opportunity to experience once they get there?
Families should be able to find learning environments that reflect their children’s interests, strengths, aspirations, and needs. But the number of options open to a family tells us very little about the quality of those options, or whether every family can realistically reach them. That distinction matters for magnet schools.
Magnet schools were built around a powerful idea: create distinctive, high-quality educational experiences compelling enough to bring students from different backgrounds together. Their value has never been choice alone. Their value is what intentional design makes possible through that choice.
Research from the Learning Policy Institute on integration and equity through magnet schools names several elements that help build diverse and effective magnet schools:
Those are not marketing strategies. They are opportunity infrastructure.
These elements point toward what I call Choice with Purpose. Choice with Purpose asks leaders to look past how many programs we offer and examine who can actually benefit from them:
A district can offer 20 specialized programs and still have an opportunity problem.
That is why access and opportunity cannot be treated as synonyms. Access gives students options. Design turns those options into opportunity.
This is where magnet schools can offer an important lesson to the broader public education system, and the timing matters. The U.S. Department of Education’s Supplemental Priorities for discretionary grants now include both Meaningful Learning Opportunities (finalized February 2026) and Career Pathways and Workforce Readiness (finalized April 2026). Federal policy is saying outright that what students experience matters as much as where they enroll. That is exactly the work magnet schools were designed to do.
Competing over students will not secure the future of public education. What will strengthen it is creating schools and learning experiences worth choosing. Those are schools that connect rigorous academics with student interests, future pathways, authentic problems, meaningful relationships, and a real sense of possibility.
As school choice expands, magnet leaders should not simply ask how we stay competitive. We should ask something bigger: What are we designing that gives families a compelling reason to choose public education?
This semester, take the seven Choice with Purpose questions to your leadership team and answer them honestly for each magnet program you run. Where you can, use enrollment, participation, and outcome data instead of impressions. Wherever the answers differ by neighborhood, language, income, or background, you’ve found where design work needs to start. Because choice is not the goal. Opportunity is.
Baron Davis, PhD, 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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