New Jersey Schools Becoming More Segregated, New Report Finds

It's been more than 60 years since the Supreme Court ruled segregated schools are unconstitutional in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case. But the problem is still very much alive across the country. And a new report finds it's getting worse in New Jersey.

A study from the UCLA Civil Rights Project found New Jersey is the sixth most segregated state in the nation for black students, and seventh for Latinos. It showed that between 1989 and 2015, the percentage of students in so-called "apartheid schools" — which have less than 1 percent of white students — has doubled. 

"The numbers are stark," said Ryan Coughlan, a co-author on the report and an assistant professor at CUNY's Guttman Community College.

One cause of the increasing school segregation is the state's residential segregation, he said. New Jersey has nearly 600 school districts — some of which are tiny — so schools rarely combine students from different towns.

"People are able to put up borders around their town and provide an education just for that isolated population," Coughlan said.

Another factor is the changing demographics of the state. According to the report, less than half of the population of school age children in New Jersey public schools is white. And that number has dropped precipitously over the last 25 years, leading to more schools with concentrated minority populations.

But there's still a lot the state could do to integrate schools, Coughlan said. Consolidating school districts is one option that's had some success in the past. In 1971, in response to a state supreme court ruling, two different school districts combined to become Morris School District. And that has become one of the most diverse districts in the state.

"That doesn't mean they've solved the school segregation problem," Coughlan said. Although the school is a diverse space now, it still needs to focus on becoming a "productive diverse space," he said. That means training teachers to recognize the identities of all the students and creating an environment where they're all celebrated equally. 

School segregation is part of a larger cultural issue, Coughlan said. "And until we really see this as a more holistic issue where we deal with segregation in our churches, in our neighborhoods, at our workplaces, we're never really going to be able to solve this problem."