The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

August 1985: Volume 1, Number 1

Final Regulations Issued For Magnet Schools Assistance Program

The Department of Education has issued final regulations to implement the Magnet Schools Assistance Program (Title VII of the Education for Economic Security Act) ten months after Congress authorized $75 million for the program. Financial assistance is provided to local school districts on a competitive basis to establish and operate magnet schools incident to eliminating minority group segregation, and to encourage development of academic and vocational instruction within magnet schools. Special consideration will be given to local school districts that received $1 million less under the Chapter 2 education block grant program in fiscal year 1982 than they received under the Emergency School Aid Act (ESAA). ESAA provided funds directly to local school districts to assist in the implementation of school desegregation plans. A study by the American Association of School Administrators (1983) found that under the education block grant only 5.7 percent of the school districts surveyed used block grant funds for any desegregation activities. In 1983 Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Dale E. Kildee (D-MI.) were unsuccessful in their efforts to reenact ESAA through the Emergency School Aid Extension Act. But, due to the persistent leadership of Senator Moynihan, the Magnet Schools Program was passed in 1984 to replace some of the funds school districts lost under the block grant. The Administration has asked Congress to rescind the funding for the program. Secretary of Education William Bennett has stated that this effort can be "taken up by local and state agencies." The experience with the block grant indicates otherwise: states have neither the resources nor apparently the desire to fund school desegregation efforts.

In enacting the law, Congress limited the use of funds for any course of instruction the LEA determines is "secular humanism." The term, however, is not defined in the regulations, and many fear that school districts will elect to limit classroom discussions to noncontroversial subjects in an attempt to avoid complaints. Anthony T. Podesta, President of People for the American Way, stated that the term is used by the far-right to refer to "everything they don't like, from evolution and sex to Homer, Hawthorne, and Hemingway." A pamphlet distributed by a Texas Pro-Family Forum states that topics such as ecology, racial equality poverty, love, church, free enterprise, war, death etc. promote secular humanism (emphasis added). Without guidance from the Department of Education, the nation's classrooms may be subjected to censorship from the far-right, and the nation's children may receive an education void of critical discussion and thinking.