that environment. Some black students emphasized with friends attending other schools who criticized them for going to Lamar that they only attended the school. Curtis wrote that some Lamar white students felt that "going to school with blacks [was] a duty they must perform, a quirk of history they must indulge." In 2006 Lisa Viator from the Houston Chronicle stated that between the 1950s and 2006 the school had transitioned from "an exclusive suburban institution" to a multiethnic urban high school. As of 2010 the Lamar campus was built to accommodate 2,525 students but housed an additional 740 students as of the 2010–2011 school year. It is one of the most popular high schools for transferring in HISD and is one of the most ethnically diverse in the city. Academics and student performance In 2008 William G. Ouchi, author of Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education They Need, stated that Lamar was one of the two "elite" public high schools in Houston along with Bellaire High School. In 1979, Al Reinert of Texas Monthly stated that Lamar was historically one of the two elite public high schools in all of Texas, along with Highland Park High School near Dallas. Laura Nathan-Garner, author of the second edition of the Insiders' Guide to Houston (2012), wrote that Lamar was "considered one of the area's best public high schools." In January 2015 the school began issuing laptop computers to all students. Several classes now use the "flipped classroom" model where the teacher uploads lectures that may be viewed over the internet at any time, while hands-on work is done in the classroom. In the pre-desegregation period just about all Lamar students matriculated to colleges and universities. After desegregation in the 1970s and the resulting social class changes, the percentage of students moving on to colleges and universities was down to about 66% by 1975. At that time there were declines in the National Merit Qualifying Exam and SAT test scores. In 2007, Lamar was ranked as in Jay Mathews Newsweeks lists of the top high schools in the United States. Many students in other parts of Houston ISD transfer to Lamar to escape home schools that do not have a good academic performance, causing the attendance figures of those schools to suffer. In 2007 Todd Spivak of the Houston Press reported about the magazine's feature "These Kids