When they began more than 20 years ago, magnet schools provided an enormous breakthrough: a way to marry the importance of racially integrated schools with the concept of public school choice. Today, however, the magnet school concept needs to be updated in order to meet new realities. In particular, magnets should be expanded and universalized, and they should begin to focus on diversity by economic status as well as race.

Universalizing Magnets. For many years, magnets have been criticized both for being a "drop in the bucket" on integration and for creating a two tier system of public education: an elite set of schools that everyone wants to get into, and then a set of inferior non-magnet schools that serve as "dumping grounds."

To respond to this criticism, a number of districts - including Cambridge, Massachusetts, Montclair New Jersey, and dozens of other jurisdictions - have universalized magnets, making every school a magnet school. Under a system of student assignment known as "controlled choice," school officials end automatic assignment based on what neighborhood people can afford to live in. Officials poll parents to find out what kinds of schools they'd like - what special signatures or themes (computers, arts) or special pedagogical approaches (Montessori, back to basics) are popular - and then every school in the region is magnetized. Families rank preferences and those choices are honored by school officials with the goal of ensuring all schools are integrated. In most jurisdictions with controlled choice, roughly 90% of families receive one of their first three choices. A 1998 Public Agenda poll found that while white parents opposed compulsory busing 76-22%, they favored, by 61-35%, controlled choice. Controlled choice plans must be implemented carefully and intelligently so as not to dilute the high quality of magnet schooling, but if we are concerned about giving all children a chance to have an excellent education, universal magnets should be the ultimate goal.

Economic Diversity. Magnet schools should also pay greater attention to economic diversity. As a matter of law, using race in student assignment, in magnet schools and elsewhere, is coming under increasing attack. U.S. Supreme Court rulings in recent years have made clear that any use of race by the government - even for the benign purpose of integration and promoting diversity - is subject to "strict scrutiny" under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. In practical terms, this means "not never, but almost never," creating a strong presumption against using race.

A number of districts, from La Crosse Wisconsin; to Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina; to San Francisco, California; and Cambridge, Massachusetts are relying primarily on economic indicators as a legal way of promoting both economic and racial diversity. One standard measure is student eligibility for free and reduced price lunch, which is set at 185% of the poverty line or about $33,000 for a family of four. Given the overlap between race and economic status, using economic status will produce a fair amount of racial diversity without relying on race per se.

But economic integration is not just a sly legal maneuver to get a certain racial result through the backdoor. Economic diversity is important in its own right and is something magnet schools should have been thinking about all along. Too often, magnet schools have been racially integrated but economically segregated, creaming middle class black, Latino, and white students and leaving the rest of the schools in a district with greater poverty concentrations.

These poverty concentrations pose a severe problem because the social science research makes clear what parents know: majority middle class schools tend to work well and poverty concentrated schools do not. The good news is that nationally, about two-thirds of students are middle class (not eligible for subsidized lunch) so the concept of making all schools middle class through universal magnets is entirely within our grasp.

To be sure, racial integration remains an extremely important goal if we want our schools to produce tolerant adults and good citizens. But the social science research going back to the Coleman Report in the 1960s has consistently found, time and time again, that the single most important factor driving school quality is the socioeconomic status of the student body.

In thinking about factors that make for good schools, middle class schools consistently are better positioned to deliver these ingredients:

1. An adequate financial base (as measured against student needs) to provide small class size, modern equipment and the like. Middle-income schools, on average, spend as much as twice what low income schools spend per pupil.

2. A place where money is spent wisely, on the classroom rather than on bureaucracy. In middle class areas, pressure is less intense to make education a jobs program, so bureaucracies are less likely to be bloated.

3. An orderly environment. Middle-class schools report disorder problems half as often as low income schools.

4. A stable student and teacher population. Middle- class schools see half as much student mobility as higher poverty schools, and teacher mobility is one-fourth as high.

5. A good principal and well-qualified teachers trained in the subject they are teaching. Teachers in middle class schools are more likely to be licensed, less likely to teach out of their field of expertise, less likely to have low teacher test scores, less likely to be inexperienced, and more likely to have greater formal education. Even when paid comparable salaries, teachers consider it a promotion to move from poor to middle class schools, and the best teachers usually transfer into middle income schools at the first opportunity.

7. Active parental involvement. In middle class schools, parents are four times as likely to be members of the PTA and much more likely to participate in fundraising.

8. Motivated peers who value achievement and encourage it among classmates. Peers in middle income schools are more academically engaged, more likely to do homework, less likely to watch TV, less likely to cut class and more likely to graduate - all of which have been found to influence the behavior of classmates.

9. High achieving peers, whose knowledge is shared informally with classmates all day long. In middle class schools, peers come to schools with twice the vocabulary of low income children, so any given child is more likely to expand his vocabulary through informal interaction.

10. Well connected peers who will help provide access to jobs down the line. Children attending middle class schools are given access to informal connections that serve children well in finding jobs after graduation.

There are exceptions to the rule - the Heritage Foundation found 21 high poverty schools that are also high performing - but there are 7,000 high poverty schools that the U.S. Department of Education identifies as failing, so the odds of success are tiny.

Economic integration through universal magnet schools may require heavy lifting politically, but the concept of socioeconomic integration is profoundly American. The notion of the "common school," in which everyone comes together and learns what it means to be an American, to live in a democracy, resonates with people. If we want to make good on our promise of education as an engine for social mobility, we may not have any other choice.

Richard Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. This article is drawn from remarks presented before the 20th Annual Magnet Schools of America Conference on May 1, 2002.