Once considered a way to help integrate racially divided districts, magnet schools today have been forced to evolve, given increasing pressure to provide more public school choices and legal barriers against using race to determine school enrollment. In a post-desegregation era, many large districts like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore County…

For all the national and even international debate about the state of American education, public schooling in the U.S. is still a local matter--and the school district remains its hub. As administrators know, there's nothing abstract about the process of getting millions of students into their seats, assuring they receive the instruction they're…