Should SFUSD emulate LAUSD's magnets?

The link to Sandra Tsing Loh's latest multilayered tribute to urban public education has been getting sent around and posted all month. (It's Tales Out of School in the March 2008 Atlantic.)

Every time it lands in my inbox I click on it again. This part keeps popping out at me:

After a fair amount of heartache, I have to admit I have given up on trying to charm white people, at least a certain NPR-listening, Bobo, chattering class of white people, back into public school. For these shrinking families, the aesthetics alone of public schools are horrifying—the chain-link fence, putty-colored bungalows, fluorescent lighting. Confessed one writer dad to me, about his son’s corner elementary (which he did not have the heart to step inside): “Even the grass made me sad.” Another white mom rejected my daughters’ school because our kindergarten wall art looked “rote.” Asians, on the other hand, tend to overlook the occasional snarl of graffiti (in our city, a way of life). What they see at Van Nuys High, for instance, with penetrating laser vision, are the math and medical magnets embedded within. Indeed, I’ve gradually become aware—via frequent newsletters—that behind those high brown walls flourishes a buzzing hive of Korean Magnet Parents. They are busily committee-meeting, Teacher Appreciation–lunching, and catapulting their children from Van Nuys High School directly into Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Caltech, Berkeley! Why should they spend $25,000 for each year of high school to make the Ivy League? These immigrants know how to find value!

This could be — at least partly — describing Lowell, though I don't perceive a "buzzing hive" of involvement there among immigrant parents. But what about the notion of math and medical magnets? If SFUSD can launch popular language immersion schools every year, how hard could it be to check out those schools-within-schools at big and diverse Van Nuys High and consider replicating them?