A magnet school is just a school that will take students from anywhere in the district instead of only students that live nearby. Some require tests to attend, but others do not.

But yes, there are public schools for gifted students that admit purely based on academic merit and exam scores. In theory, a rich student would not be able to buy their way in. In practice, having a tutor who can coach a child on exam specifics is a very large advantage.

They exist. I was quite poor while my first 2 kids were in high school. Oldest got a scholarship to a private school, second went to a magnet 'school within a school' and both were admitted based on test scores and essays. Second 2 kids, one went to the school within a school academic magnet and the other to a performing arts magnet school. Academic was just grades and test scores they no longer required an essay; arts required an audition.

So not "gifted" per se - that's the testing you have to put them through to get them in good public school classes in regular schools in grade 1-8, testing for potential, basically. Magnet school for those grades is allegedly random choice but you are correct it's not all that random, it's weighted. For high school it's by achievement not potential.

A lot of larger cities like New York and Chicago have magnet schools. They usually take a mix of merit students and endowment students, making it easy for rich people to buy their kids into them. Smaller cities and most towns have gifted and talented programs connected to public schools instead of their own schools. Your polycule is correct that they're usually just resume builders for rich kids, but it is totally possible for a poor white kid from Queens to get accepted through the merit track.

As a low income white boy from Queens myself, I can say with confidence yes they totally exist. I can't speak for the rest of the country but in NYC there are a bunch of public/free magnet schools, that you get into on merit alone. Many years ago I tried to get into Bronx science high school but my grades weren't good enough, so I ended up having to go to a standard NYC public high school.

Yes. I went to a magnet school.

This school had both normal classes and magnet classes.

I was very intimidated by the magnet classes, so I never applied until my last year. When I did get into the smart classes, I realized they weren't necessarily more difficult. The biggest difference was that the kids who didn't want to be there and constantly distracted the class were absent, so we were able to get more done every day.

Also, the teachers are generally better (less likely to get a Football coach who teaches on the side). But the curriculum is the same.

I was pissed that I wasn't in those classes sooner.

I went to a magnet school in Florida. It was a "school within a school" in a public school. They'd bus you in from where ever in the county, instead of forcing you to go to your assigned school - except they stopped that a couple years in which made it a lot less accessible for many people. But it was free and admission was based on writing an essay.

One of my kids went to a magnet school for performing arts. They're public schools, and they don't cost extra, but you do have to apply for them if you don't live in the immediate area and there's an element of competition to get in.

The idea behind magnet schools is that you can improve the overall academic performance of a school if you increase the diversity of the economic and academic backgrounds of the students. Schools in the US are tied to a geographic area, which in turn is generally correlated with income - poor areas tend to have bad schools with low funding; richer areas have much better schools with better funding. With magnet schools the state/school district/whatever will take a struggling school, pump a bunch of extra funding into it, and give it some sort of academic theme (e.g. visual arts, performing arts, STEM, etc.) with the goal of attracting gifted students from outside to come to the school.

One thing you need to understand it that under the American Federal system, each state is responsible for its schools and each local county runs its own Board of Education. So, you can have two high schools a few miles apart where one spends $5 million on a football stadium and the other spends $5 million on a science lab.

New York City has Bronx Science and Stuyversant High Schools that require special tests to get accepted. There's also Music and Art, Art and Design, and other elite schools.

Yes the US does.

There are public schools that kids have to apply for and there are a number of private schools that kids have to apply for.

Magnet schools are not fake nor are they only for the rich. A buddy of mine who is an electrician, his daughter applied and is starter her freshmen year at one this year.

half of My polycule says that magnet schools are all fake

US magnet schools are real, although controlled by the local school district rather than the federal govt. They tend to be organized around subject (STEM, performing arts, etc) rather than cognitive gift per se . One might argue that a pre-law/pre-med magnet could have substantial overlap with cognitive ability.

Services for the cognitively "gifted", to the degree they exist, tend to be located within a given school. They have a special curriculum, the flipside of one might have for kids who are cognitively challenged.

and only serve the rich. There’s no way a low income white boy

I assure you that isn't true, both from direct experience and from working in magnets. Rich folks can likely influence any situation but magnet != private school for rich kids.

it doesn’t have any dumb jock types

They typically don't have competitive sports teams so any jock-ness is individual rather than collective. Kids geographically local to a magnet can often attend automatically so there is a subset of Normals at a magnet, including jocks.

Stuff in NYC is frequently an outlier and only exists that way there and it doesn't really mean anything. Most places it's a different class not an entire school.

Beyond magnet schools, there are private schools that students need to apply for and/or test into. Like magnet schools, there are a wide variety of them and some are crappy and religious, but a lot of others are essentially schools for smart kids that focus on getting them into good colleges (usually called prep schools when this is the main goal).

Some can be very expensive and cost more than many colleges, but because of that you can find ones with a ton of money (sometimes into the billions) that accept students based on their testing and application alone without considering their financial status, called need-blind acceptance (that article only mentions colleges but it applies to these private schools as well). If a student is accepted need-blind and can't afford tuition the school covers the entire cost. Other schools that aren't need-blind offer varying levels of financial assistance for students who are accepted.

In terms of sports, prep schools (especially the wealthier ones) tend to have a lot of different ones, even sports that aren't usually offered in public schools (crew aka rowing is an example). Check out this list of sports from Phillips Academy, for example. College admissions in the US includes looking at "well-rounded" students, so competing in (time-consuming) sports while maintaining academic performance is one way to show your ability to handle time-management, etc. This means you might get kind of jocky type students, but they aren't really the dumb variety you see portrayed in movies.

The Boston area definitely has some exam schools. Boston Latin is the oldest.

Not so much "gifted" schools but "prestige" schools like Harvard or Yale where money speaks loudly.

I think it depends. Education is handled at a local level for the most part. That’s why school quality varies so much based on the income level of the area. I know NYC has such a system, but I don’t think my school district in the suburbs did. My parents did take me to go look at some special school when I was young, but it was nowhere close to us and I assume private. I didn’t like the place so I didn’t end up going and stayed in our local public schools.

Damn, this just led me down a rabbit hole that made me discover that 48% of Australian high school kids go to private schools ... What's going on over there? It's like 5-9% in the US and Canada.

I went to a magnet school in FL. Magnet schools exists but I don't believe it has much to do with being gifted or money.

When I went, as long as you had 2 / 3 gpa ( B / C avg) you got to sign up and stay in the program (2 gpa per year to stay). Didn't have to do anything else to sign up or stay in the program, as long as you had a pretty mid grade average and there were spots to be in it, bar was set low but could have just been a FL thing.

Looking back at how many people I was in those classes with, I only recall about 5 people actually go into the specific field the magnet was for personally.

They definitely still exist: https://magnet.edu/

I don't have much firsthand experience with them but there's a known stereotype that, if an influential person wants their kid in one, they can find a way, even though it's supposed to be strictly merit based. I believe most of them accept a certain percentage of poor kids, whether because there are some people in the school system who believe in what they're doing, or merely to maintain the illusion of fair play, I couldn't speculate. I've known some people who went to one and they didn't seem to have benefited immensely from the privilege, though they generally seemed positive about them, the few times we discussed it.

The USA doesn't have a system of magnet schools. Some parts of the country, including New York City, do.

New York City's school district has several high schools that you have to a test to get into that high school or have an artistic portfolio. These tests are very competitive and the high schools are geared to help funnel the brightest of New York City's youth into college. There is no tuition to get in and these high schools are seen as a gateway to the best colleges in the world.

Most school districts in the USA don't have these public magnet schools.

There are occasionally private schools that cater specifically to gifted children but they area somewhat rare.

Many public schools have gifted programs to identify and foster the education of gifted students but they are generally being cut in most places and outright banned in some areas.

The overall trend in the US is to pass students who can't read, write or do basic math. There is no real push to care about high achievers.