Policymakers originally created magnets to voluntarily enroll a racially diverse population of students in non-White city neighborhoods by offering unique curricular experiences intended to attract White parents. Successfully desegregated magnets inorganically curated racially mixed schools by appealing to the interests of affluent and/or White non-neighborhood families, while also promoting information, open access, and desegregation standards. Understanding that magnets' operational goals have shifted since their inception, this dissertation seeks to explore both how magnets have demographically changed in the past two decades, and the extent to which those changes are associated with variations in students' climate perceptions. Guided by the underlying theory of magnet schools, the first part of this study uses national data to descriptively analyze demographic differences between magnet and non-magnet schools' student enrollments in a sample of urban districts from 2000 to 2018. Results indicate that magnet schools had significantly different average demographic compositions of students than non-magnet schools, but those differences were less apparent when analyzing demographics between urban districts with and without magnet schools. To the extent that White enrollment is representative of magnets' propensity to attract and enroll White students, this study finds magnets were not functioning as historically intended over the past two decades. The second part of this study analyzes demographic school changes in Georgia and utilizes student data from the 2018-19 administration of the Georgia Student Health Survey to empirically assess how students felt across a sample of urban schools. Increasingly controlled OLS regressions are used to determine differences in students' climate perceptions by school type (magnet or non-magnet) and race/ethnicity, and Byrd's (2015) school racial climate framework informs the interpretations of results. Moderation analyses are also used to explore how magnet schools' present level of White enrollment drives differences in students' climate perceptions. Results indicate that magnet students had lower average perceptions of climate relative to non-magnet students, and perceptions varied by students' race/ethnicity and schools' level of White enrollment. This study ultimately explicates the demographic compositions and climate experiences distinctive to magnet schools. The findings present important scholarly and policy implications related to magnets' functionality in today's urban education context. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]