单项选择题

Soon after principal Kevin Lowndes welcomes new students to Wheaton High School each fall, he begins recruiting the next freshman class. Seven years ago, Montgomery County’s school board placed Wheaton in a group of five public high schools known as the "Down County Consortium (联盟). " The board approved specialty themes for each, then invited families in the area to choose the school and program they like best.
The aging brick building in a working-class neighborhood of Silver Spring now showcases its engineering and bioscience programs during open houses and information sessions, in an online video, and during visits to middle schools and informal meetings with neighborhood parents. "You need to get out there and sell your school and sell your programs and recruit your students," Lowndes said.
As school choice becomes a slogan of 21st century education reform, especially for the growing charter school movement, traditional public schools also are embracing free-market competition.
Tens of thousands of Washington area children crisscross their districts to attend specialized science, foreign language or performing-arts programs in regular public schools. The mission of these choice programs is changing, though. Magnet schools, offering specialized curriculum to attract students beyond neighborhood boundaries, were created in the 1960s as tools for voluntary desegregation (废除种族隔离). But as courts removed school assignment policies based on race, many school districts have played down—or abandoned—their diversity goals.
Now, choice in many traditional public schools is seen a way to increase student performance and parent satisfaction as well as to stay competitive with private schools and public charters. "I like choice," said Dara Gideos, a Silver Spring parent. "It makes you feel like you are controlling your destiny. " Gideos did not want her eighth-grade daughter to attend Wheaton, her neighborhood high school, so she was glad to have other schools to choose from.
After visiting open houses all fall, Gideos expects to find out her daughter’s final assignment by mid-February. In a sign of the changing times, many school districts are abandoning the term magnet. But Magnets are associated with desegregation.
The Prince George’s school board shut three dozen magnet programs after court-ordered desegregation ended in 2004. Diversity goals had become harder to achieve in the predominantly black school system, and officials found that extra program costs were not leading to better results.
What do we learn from the last paragraph