ABSTRACT
In spite of the issues of stratified enrollment and the pre-lottery, teachers and staff also felt strongly that “we take all kids in through the lottery . . . and we eventually do good things with most kids.” Though Ohio Magnet School (OMS) had a reputation for producing elite students and “skimming off the top” the best students in the district, it was very clear during my time there that they were educating a full spectrum of students from the very driven to the very apathetic and everything in between. It is the students that did not fit neatly into either category of the “successful student” or “those students,” the ones that exceeded what were perceived to be the knowable properties of their existence, that made clear that all students are subjects in the making, remaking, and resistance of identity. They are urban educational subjects on their own terms.
