Dive Brief:

• The Mulholland Robotics Middle School is perhaps the only such middle school to allow students to focus on robotics in every class, and it opened this year inside of the traditional Mulholland middle school as a magnet.
• EdSource reports the traditional school’s enrollment dropped by 40% over the last decade, but the new magnet program drew 200 sixth and seventh graders in its first year, where girls and boys together get a chance to build robots and think about their application in their full range of other classes.   
• The robotics program started last year as a lab and after-school program with $150,000 from the school board, and this year it joined 15 other new magnet schools opening in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Dive Insight:

Many districts have used magnet programs to entice students to schools they might otherwise overlook. Traditionally, magnets have helped diversify student populations in neighborhoods with high numbers of low-income or minority students. The programs draw wealthier white students to the unique learning opportunities. In Los Angeles, where magnets have become a key strategy to compete with charter schools that have attracted hundreds of thousands of its students, there is a concern that magnets are being opened at a rate that undermines their reputation.

Schools that give younger and younger students a chance to specialize in science, technology, engineering and math, however, don’t seem like they’ll wane in popularity anytime soon. The ongoing conversation about a skill gap in the nation’s labor force has made parents and students alike look at STEM careers as stable options, and with a range of efforts to diversify the pipeline, STEM programs targeted at black and Latino students, as well as girls, are popping up in every state.