This is America: The Morris District\u27s Potential to be a Model of School Diversity

For Paul Tractenberg—a law professor and long-time legal advocate for educational equity and funding equalization in New Jersey, this was a story that he always wanted to tell. As Paul described it to me, to our co-author Ryan Coughlan, and to the nearly 100 Morristown residents and school staff that we would eventually interview for the Morris project, studying the 1971 Jenkins Case that brought about the merger of two racially distinct Morristown and Morris Township K-8 school systems had been percolating in his mind since the early 70’s. When we began the project three years ago, we did not anticipate how complicated it would be to put the history of the merger into the current context. We also did not anticipate that Morris would provide such hope in the current neoliberal era of school segregation, inequality, and privatization. Morris School District (MSD) is one of the most integrated school districts in New Jersey and this is commendable. The district’s 45- year history is unique because it is the only district in the state and country that was merged by order of the state commissioner of education for the purpose of achieving racial balance. Today, the district has maintained its incredible diversity. Out of 5,226 students, MSD’s 2014–15 demographic profile is 52 percent White students, 11 percent Black, 32 percent Latino, and 5 percent Asian. Approximately 35 percent receive free or reduced-price lunch. Surprisingly, very few people have ever heard of the Morris district, including long-time New Jersey residents and individuals knowledgeable about education in the state

School Choice Policies and Racial Segregation: Where White Parents’ Good Intentions, Anxiety, and Privilege Collide

A growing body of school choice research has shown that when school choice policies are not designed to racially or socioeconomically integrate schools, that is, are “colorblind” policies, they generally manage to do the opposite, leading to greater stratification and separation of students by race and ethnicity across schools and programs. Since white, advantaged parents are more likely to get their children into the highest-status schools regardless of the school choice policy in place, we believed that more research was needed on how those parents interact with school choice policies and whether they would support changes to those policies that would lead to less segregation across schools. Our interviews with advantaged New York City parents suggest that many are bothered by the segregation but that they are concerned that their children gain access to the “best” (mostly white) schools. The contradictions inherent in their choices are reconcilable, we argue, by offering more diverse and undivided school options

Why Boundaries Matter: A Study of Five Separate and Unequal Long Island School Districts

If ever there were any doubt that Long Island, New York, is home to some of the most fragmented, segregated and unequal school districts in the United States, the January 2009 Long Island Index Report, provides ample evidence that this is indeed the case. The quantifiable inequities across the 125 school districts on Long Island in terms of funding, demographics, and student outcomes highlighted in that report portray how important district boundary lines are, even within relatively small geographic spaces. Building on the Index’s presentation of quantitative data, this report offers a more in‐depth examination of district‐level disparities and what they mean in the lives of students, educators and parents across these boundary lines. Although the spatial separation of students across district boundaries has not been the central ‐‐ or even peripheral –focusof education policymakers for the last three decades, we argue that the social science evidence on the consequences of such separation warrants a renewed consideration of these issues. Indeed, in the current era of education reform, with its strong emphasis on standards, accountabilityandmarket‐based policies, little attention has been paid to the relationship between place and opportunity or the way in which “place” is circumscribed by race/ethnicity and poverty to profoundly affect students’ educational experiences. Furthermore, even as the policy gaze has drifted away from these issues, research evidence is mounting that separate can never be equal in public education because of the tight connection between public schools and their larger contexts. This is particularly the case when those larger contexts are restricted by boundaries that demarcate different property values, tax rates, public revenues, private resources, working conditions, family income and wealth, parental educational levels and political clout. All of these factors, which are both internal and external to the schools themselves, profoundly affect the day‐to‐day experiences of children. As a result, we cannot lose sight of why we care about issues of segregation by race/ethnicity or socio‐economic status, particularly as the school‐age population in this country becomes increasingly diverse and as more African American, Latino and immigrant families migrate from cities to the suburbs. Arguments for turning our backs on the problems of segregation and the inequality it perpetuates and focusing instead on how to educate children to high standards “where they are” – be that in all‐black and Latino schools with high levels of poverty or in predominantly white and/or Asian schools with high concentrations of wealth – resonate with current conceptions of what is “wrong” with public education and how we can fix it. This report attempts to build a bridge between the plethora of data documenting the high degree of segregation and inequality in places like Long Island and our nation’s collective understanding of the “problems” facing public education today. We do this by bringing the voices of more than 75 Long Islanders into the discussion and dialogue about public education and what it looks and feels like across school district dividing lines of race, ethnicity, and class. What we hear in these voices – whether they are privileged, affluent white students in a low‐needs district or educators struggling to provide an “adequate” education for the poorest students of color in a high‐needs district – is how the separateness defines them and their educational opportunities. We have learned that school district boundaries in places like Long Island matter a great deal to the students and educators who toil within them each day and to the parents and other property owners who purchase homes in a housing market that is partly defined by their existence. The strong relationship between the disparate educational experiences of children whose schools and opportunities are divided by these boundaries and the unequal values of the property their parents purchase is perhaps the single most important challenge to the so‐called American Dream that we can document. The fact that these disparities are so starkly defined by race/ethnicity and social class should give us pause in a country that likes to think of itself as “post‐racial” and “colorblind.” This report documents the multiple ways in which place and race/ethnicity matter in terms of students’ educational opportunities, and how the two combined and intertwined as they are today in districts, schools and classrooms, define students’ and educators’ sense of possibility and self‐worth in a manner unlikely to ever be undone. These deep‐seated messages become ingrained in the students’ identities and in the reputations of their schools, districts and communities – allowing a self‐fulfilling prophecy to play itself out as students matriculate through the educational system with starkly different opportunities, outcomes and connections to higher education. These ingrained differences in identities and reputations, then, become part of the everyday common sense that legitimizes the current fragmented and segregated system. In a vicious cycle, the resulting inequality becomes, for those on the more affluent and privileged side of the divide, the ammunition for their resistance to change the boundaries or even to allow students to cross them. These complex issues are only understood through the kind of qualitative data that this research brings to bear on the subject of school district fragmentation and segregation. Through the eyes of Long Islanders in five disparate school districts we can see these connections and relationships. This analysis, therefore, helps us understand why ‐‐ despite survey data from Long Island showing members of all racial/ethnic groups state that something should be done to break down the barriers across district boundaries ‐‐ those with the most power and privilege preserve the boundaries around their school districts and thus around other districts as well (The Long Island Index, 2009). This form of double consciousness ‐‐ bemoaning inequality while perpetuating the insidious system that maintains it – represents the 21st Century’s version of the American Dilemma (see DuBois, 2003; Myrdal, 1946)

Divided We Fall: The Story of Separate and Unequal Suburban Schools 60 Years after Brown v. Board of Education

This report is a clarion call for those paying attention to the changing racial and ethnic demographics of this country and its suburbs in particular. It is the in-depth story of one suburban county and its public schools as the demographics of who lives in the suburbs versus the cities in the 21st century is shifting quickly, as the affluent and the poor, the black and the white are trading places across urban-suburban boundary lines. The same story could be told about hundreds of suburban counties across the country that are facing similar pressures and approaching similar breaking points. In the statistical data we analyzed and in the voices of the 800 people we interviewed and surveyed in Nassau County, Long Island - the home of Levittown, the first post-WWII archetypal suburb -- there is mounting anxiety about the future of American suburbs and their public schools. We found much frustration about how the economy, housing market, lack of infrastructure and public policies negatively affect these communities. In this report, we convert this angst into a reality check for anyone who may think that racially and ethnically diverse suburbs are easily accomplished or that they do not face serious obstacles. These obstacles include racially and ethnically segregated housing patterns amid fragmented and divided municipalities and school districts and the brain drain of more affluent and educated residents who grew up in the suburbs but now prefer city life. Meanwhile, these suburbs are tubs on their own bottoms, heavily reliant on local sources of funding, namely property taxes, to pay for public schools and municipal services. This means that public school resources and reputations are spread unevenly across separate and unequal suburban school districts

Still Separate, Still Unequal, But Not Always So Suburban : The Changing Natured of Suburban School Districts in the New York Metropolitan Area

Woven throughout the history of the United States is a narrative of human movement. The story of this country, we argue, is a tale of the constant flow of people across geographic spaces—both voluntary and forced immigrations, migrations, and the settlements of villages, city neighborhoods, and suburban communities. Beginning with Native Americans\u27 ancestors who traversed the Bering Straight, movement has been a central, identifying theme of this nation. The flow of several waves of European immigrants onto colonial shores and across the plains and the haulage of millions of Africans via the slave trade redefined the United States demographically and geopolitically, as did the mass migration of freed African Americans from the South to the North and from the farms to the cities in the 20th century. The post- World War II construction of suburbia enabled the European immigrants and their decedents to migrate from the cities to the suburbs en masse, changing not only the character of suburbia but also the cities and ethnic enclaves they left behind. As if choreographed by the federal government, local zoning laws and real estate markets, this flow of whites to the suburbs was synchronized with the arrival of African American migrants into specific and highly contained city neighborhoods. But even the resulting racially segregated pattern of vanilla suburbs and chocolate cities that seemed fairly stable by the late 1970s across most metro areas was subject to change. Beginning in the late 1960s, new waves of immigrants, primarily from Latin America and Asia, entered the urban neighborhoods abandoned by their European immigrant predecessors. By the 1980s, growing numbers of African Americans had begun migrating to the suburbs. And, in the last decade, more Latino and Asian immigrants have chosen suburban communities as their port of entry to the United States. At the same time, whites— particularly affluent and well-educated professionals—are migrating back into cosmopolitan and gentrified city neighborhoods, opting out of increasingly diverse suburbs