Tips for getting your kids picked up by a magnet

Negligent Los Angeles parents take note: You have only until Friday to get a postmark on the magnet school application that your more responsible peers regard -- rightly or wrongly -- as their last desperate hope for getting their children a good education at taxpayer expense.

Don’t panic, though.

Sure, last school year 65,000 applicants battled for about 16,000 spots at 162 Los Angeles Unified School District magnet campuses with concentrations on such diverse subjects as natural science, administrative law and Latin music.

And yes, really good parents have been working on strategies for accumulating magnet “points” since well before their children were born.

For those of you who aren’t that devoted, here’s a quick primer on how to game the system.

Your first faltering steps will depend on a pivotal choice.

It goes without saying that you’re terrified of the local middle school, which you just assume has lousy test scores because of those tough-looking kids you see hanging out in front, presumably spreading graffiti, smack and STDs.

But are you among the lucky few living in a middle-class niche neighborhood with a boutique elementary school that you want your child to attend?

Or did a tour of your local elementary school also make you worry that you could be tossing Precious into perdition?

In my view, parents make the magnet decision today based far more on complex issues of social class than race per se.

But race was the issue when district mucky-mucks cooked up the system in 1977 to comply with the California Supreme Court’s order to voluntarily integrate.

Thirty years later the United States Supreme Court is pondering whether magnets in other states are violating the Constitution by making enrollment decisions based on skin color. L.A. Unified’s magnet program could be at risk.

In the meantime, race remains the pivotal magnet criterion.

We’ll have to return to that. Race has nothing to do with getting those magnet points that determine your child’s position on the list that the district’s computer generates to determine who gets into each school.

They can be acquired in five ways only:

1) A child can claim four “matriculation” points for every consecutive year he’s in a magnet school, up to a total of 12 points.

2) If a child applies to a magnet and is rejected, he gets four points per rejection, again for a maximum of 12 “wait list” points.

3) If the district has slapped a PHBAO label (that’s “predominantly Hispanic, black, Asian and other non-Anglo”) on the child’s non-magnet neighborhood school, he gets another four points.

4) If that “resident” school is overcrowded, he gets another four points.

5) And if he has siblings who attend the magnet to which he’s applying, he gets another three points.

The most points a child can accumulate is 23.

The relative simplicity of this unravels, however, because of the fine print on Page 4 in the district’s pretty, new, full-color Choices brochure: “Each magnet’s openings are determined by the need to maintain a racially balanced enrollment and by available space.”

As far as the magnet program is concerned, the only categories are “minority” -- Asians, Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, African Americans and Hispanics are lumped together in this category -- and “white.”

Schools are supposed to strive for a balance of either 60% minority and 40% white or 70%-30% in very heavily “minority” neighborhoods. So the district weighs white children’s points only against other white children’s; a minority child’s against other minorities.

Because whites made up just 8.8% of the district last year, pitting the 22.2% of them who applied to magnets against the category “minorities” has a somewhat psychedelic feel.

So does the reality of white students being the beneficiaries of what usually becomes upside-down affirmative action.

To understand how to work the race angle, imagine a mom whose ancestors trace back to Scotland married to a dad whose predecessors hail from Mexico. Their little girl could flip to “minority” or flop to “white.”

Say the mom had her heart set on little Juanita-Jane snagging one of the estimated 106 seats at 32nd Street School, a K-8 performing-arts magnet with links to USC.

The district says 3,860 students applied to 32nd Street School last year. A glance at the district’s website shows that the 733-member student body is 8.7% white. So the mom would be better off embracing her child’s whiteness on the app.

At certain Valley and Westside magnets, however, the “minority” designation would be a huge advantage.

And if the mom wanted to get Juanita-Jane into the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES) magnet near La Cienega and the 10 Freeway, it would probably be a wash, because this college prep-oriented school’s student body is 29.5% white.

In any case, Juanita-Jane wouldn’t have a prayer of moving from 32nd Street to LACES regardless of racial preference.

Those matriculation points, you see, are good only for jumping from one magnet’s final grade into the next magnet’s earliest grade -- and since 32nd Street and LACES both offer grades 6-8, 12 points would instantly evaporate if the girl bailed after grade 5.

Nothing, of course, would prevent the child from trying to make the leap anyway. And if she scored in every other way, she would have 11 points.

But LACES had 2,649 applications last year. And no one with fewer than 16 points made it into the school, magnet coordinator Victoria Vickers says.

If Juanita-Jane’s mom really had her heart set on LACES, she might have been better off marking “minority” on her daughter’s application for 32nd Street School.

“Huh?” you say.

Well, as a Latina, Juanita-Jane would have a pretty good chance of being rejected, and if that went on for three years, she would have racked up 12 rejection points, bringing her possible total back up to 23.

So it is that many a parent has called many a magnet coordinator trying to figure out which school is most likely not to accept her child or, conversely, which campus has the greatest need for a kid who’s not of the district’s vast, multi-hued “minority.”

This complexity drives people batty. It explains why dozens of frantic parents have attended the “Martinis and Magnets” seminars put on by author and performance artist Sandra Tsing Loh and author Christie Mellor. It explains why, over at latimes.com/schoolme, Loh and a growing stable of battle-scarred “magnet Yentas” have been publicly wrestling with readers’ questions about magnets’ mystical intricacies.

A quick spin around LACES, the district’s first magnet, reminded me of why I think magnets are worth the stress of getting in.

I stuck my head into math, art, English, history, computer and music classes, and every teacher had complete control of the students, all of whom -- white, black, Latino, Asian, whatever -- seemed respectful and eager to learn.

“No way,” you say?

Think about it. Not all magnet schools are great, of course. And many regular schools are plenty good. But there is an element of self-selection that gives magnets an advantage.

If Juanita-Jane’s mom goes through the psychic pain of cracking the application process, is she going to let her daughter mess up?

And if parents are doing their bit to keep their kids in line academically, is it any wonder that the best teachers apply to these programs and arrive at work with a good attitude?

And if the teachers consistently challenge and encourage, is it any wonder that the kids go home motivated, which makes parents want to help with homework, attend teacher conferences and help out at the school?

I doubt many parents are going to offer up their child to the abstract goal of integration. Is it any wonder, though, that so many black, white, Latino, Filipino, Native American and Asian parents will spend this week angling to get into a school like LACES?

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To discuss this column or answer the question “is the magnet system incomprehensible?” visit latimes.com/schoolme. Bob Sipchen can be reached at bob.sipchen@latimes.com.