It's understandable why parents want to get their kids into magnet schools:

or any of us who are perplexed and apalled by the unimaginable incompetency of many (if not all) large public school districts (we'll leave smaller districts for another time), take a gander at an annual ritual of idiocy in Cincinnati, Ohio, whose schools are even worse than its professional football team. That is, of course, despite spending tons of cash on a per-pupil basis -- around $13,000 for the 2005-2006 school year, or about 50 percent more than the state average.

Like most big districts, years ago Cincinnati created a series of "magnet" schools, ostensibly as a means of offering specialized curricula equally to all students but in reality a way of keeping a dwindling handful of white parents from fleeing the district. Magnets, of course, require an application process, which already biases the programs to folks with more time, resources, and social capital. But unlike other districts that have somehow managed to come up with an application process that might be even semi-rational, the Cincinnati public school district (CPS) resorts to a bizarre first-come, first-serve setup that typically results in parents camping out overnight in front of their preferred venues, like teenagers in front of concert halls in the bad old pre-Ticketmaster days.

CPS officials are hoping to convince parents it simply isn't necessary to wait in line for days, despite the hype that builds up around the [magnet] schools with outsized demand.

It's impossible to measure this year's demand in advance, said district spokeswoman Janet Walsh, but last year, parents who stood in line for an entire weekend weren't substantially more likely to secure a spot than those who arrived just a few hours early....

CPS is not publicizing the number of available seats in advance as it did last year -- something Walsh said may have created an artificially high demand.

"People saw (how few spots were open) and figured they better get there early," said Walsh. "When in fact, almost everybody who got there within a few hours of the actual start of the open-enrollment time got in."

Principals will not allow campsites to interfere with a school day either today or Tuesday, Walsh said. That could include simply banning camping altogether, Walsh said.

It's understandable why parents want to get their kids into magnet schools: Their kids get a much better education by virtually any measure. And if their kids don't get into a magnet school, they're likely to be sent to what the Cincinnati Enquirer suggests is a "struggling school that has repeatedly failed to meet federal and state achievement standards."

CPS, writes the Enquirer with hilarious understatement, "has struggled for years in finding an application method that doesn't give an unfair advantage to families with paid vacation time, traditional work hours and cars."

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