Facing Entrenched School Segregation, New Jersey Tries Something New

In 2018, Latino and Black families in New Jersey filed a lawsuit that landed like a gut punch to the state’s progressive reputation. Public schools in New Jersey were alarmingly segregated, the plaintiffs argued, in violation of the state Constitution.

The case kicked around in the courts for years before a judge released a decision in October that made neither side happy. The next step might have been a march toward trial and years of legal wrangling that would have been likely to push the problem to New Jersey’s next governor.

But late last year the state’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, opened the door to compromise. He suggested that the parties enlist a mediator and begin settlement talks, thrusting New Jersey into an inadvertent starring national role.

Cities in many states, including Connecticut, Minnesota and New York, are actively wrestling in courts and classrooms to improve racial integration within school districts, and, in some cases, broad regions. But no state has voluntarily sought a statewide remedy to segregation in the 70 years since the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed government sanctioned, racially separate schools.

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The shake-up contemplated, according to legal filings, would be voluntary for families and would be likely to include a number of remedies, including an expansion of a program that lets a small number of children attend schools outside their home districts and adjustments to the state’s vocational school network. New magnet schools, based in cities with specialized curriculums, would be expected to attract an economically and racially diverse group of students from the surrounding region.

If implemented, the changes would reflect the most consequential shift in education policy in decades in a state already known for taking strides toward addressing school inequities. Spurred by a 1981 lawsuit, New Jersey has narrowed the funding gap between its richest and poorest districts and was the first state to mandate preschool education for at-risk students.

But it remains the seventh most segregated state for Black and Latino students, according to an April analysis by the Civil Rights Projects at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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The imbalance has only worsened in the decade since the study was released, according to the Education Law Center, a nonprofit that won a landmark 1981 lawsuit, Abbott v. Burke, that now requires New Jersey to equitably fund its poorest school districts. The student population in 31 school districts serving nearly 210,000 students is more than 90 percent Black, Latino or multiracial, according to the law center, which joined the desegregation lawsuit in February.

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