More than 65 years after the Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education, one would think substantial progress had been made in confronting the harsh realities of school segregation. Unfortunately, one would be wrong — especially in our own backyard, the great liberal stronghold that is the state of Massachusetts.
An educational study conducted by the Center for Education and Civil Rights at Pennsylvania State University found that there are now 33% more “intensely segregated” schools that concentrate students of color compared to 2008. According to a report by the Boston Globe examining the city’s school distributions, about 60% of schools remain intensely segregated.
School segregation is still startlingly prevalent in Boston, more than half a century since the landmark Supreme Court case, and continues to have harsh effects on students of color. It often creates resource discrepancies between schools. Segregated schools that concentrate Black and Latinx students tend to have a higher student-to-teacher ratio, older textbooks and supplies, lower-quality facilities, and many other material inequalities.
Material differences and varying concentrations of students in poverty can greatly impact academic achievement. This disparity is shown through the significantly lower quantifiable metrics of school achievement such as graduation rates, test scores, and college attendance statistics. A study conducted by Brown University found that, “increasing operational spending by $1,000 per pupil increased test scores by approximately 0.15 of a standard deviation and graduation rates by approximately 9 percentage points.” This change in academic performance decreases prospects for social mobility and economic achievement, which in turn concentrates poverty and violence within communities of color. It is a horrific cycle that perpetuates systemic and continued inequality.
Boston has a unique funding obstacle. While the average amount of funding per student in the United States is $12,612, Boston spends more than $24,000 per pupil. It seems like although there is extensive segregation within the region, there might be equitable access to funding and resources. Looking closer at that data, however, the influence of private financing complicates our assumption.
Boston Latin School, one of the best schools in the country, illuminates this broader phenomenon. The majority of its students are wealthier White and Asian children. While the school receives average-level of funding from the government, it has around a $60 million endowment of private funds, which is not taken into account when equitably distributing government funding. The result is a largely segregated school that is disproportionately wealthy. Boston Latin School is representative of a larger predicament in the city — an analysis of district audit data by the firm Ernst & Young found that for every 1% increase in Black and Hispanic students, the average amount of private funding decreases by $35 per student.
Resource inequities contribute to academic achievement gaps, but school segregation leads to other significant complications. The social and mental effects of segregation have never been more relevant than they are today. The Black Lives Matter Movement brought about a moral reckoning within the United States and more clearly illustrated what an intrusive force racism is within our country.
Longtime Boston teacher Barbara Fields explained in an interview with HPR that “so much of the hatred, the racial unrest, and division stems from people really not knowing and understanding each other.” Fields pointedly said that “if we don’t learn to live together, then we’re going to all perish together.” Additionally, segregation has been shown to internalize feelings of inferiority within the minds of the oppressed. White students are not exposed to diversity, and Black students are subjected to increased mental stressors.
To confront this significant issue, we have to look at the systemic origins of our current, distressing reality. A common misconception of American educational inequity is that funding discrepancies are the sole cause of disparities. While this is somewhat true, the origin of these inequalities is much more insidious and systemic. Increasing funding to under-resourced schools will not be enough to combat all the negative results of segregation.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District is helpful in understanding this occurrence. After a series of court cases brought about by parents that felt victimized by their integration system, beginning with Capacchione v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the district had to dismantle their bussing system. The district went from one of the most integrated in the country to one of the most homogeneous due to housing segregation in the region. The government offered grants and increased financing to lower funded, segregated schools to help counter the material effects of the court order. While these changes blunted its impact on academic achievement, many issues within the school system remained.
White students were not interacting with Black students, and conversely, Black students weren’t interacting with White students. There was a dire lack of connection and understanding due to this new situation. Additionally, violence and incarceration became increasingly prevalent. The study found that segregation has more of an impact on social outcomes than academic. A concentration of poverty within a school has extensive adverse effects that additional funding is simply not equipped to rectify. Instead we require a focus on combating the origin of these issues — residential segregation.
Boston is no exception to this phenomenon. There are 147 municipalities within the Boston region, and according to census data from 2017, 61 of those are at least 90% White. Boston is highly segregated residentially, and its school assignment system has exacerbated the city’s condition to create even more segregated schools.
A complex algorithm is used to assign students to schools based on their location to ensure all students have a chance to go to a school close to their home and one of a high caliber. What often occurs is that students of color are isolated into certain schools because housing is largely segregated in Boston. Poverty and people of color are concentrated within a few regions and similarly within a few schools.
This algorithm utilizes Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System scores to determine the caliber of individual schools. The process is tainted by the reality of residential segregation. Test scores don’t explain the true quality of a school but instead reflect the socioeconomic positions of their students.
Those that live in residentially segregated and high poverty areas often encounter greater instances of violence, financial insecurity, and health problems. Test scores and other numerical measurements of academic performance will be lower for those students in comparison to those that don’t live within such circumstances. While this metric fails to accurately reflect a school’s quality, it plays an outsized role in the school assignment system. Moreover, many parents choose where to live based on the schools their children would end up attending, furthering instances of White flight.
Researcher Peter Piazza with The Center for Education and Civil Rights explained in an interview with the HPR that “for integration to work, partly we need to bring White or keep White families in the Boston Public School System, and those families need to make choices to enroll their students at schools that are predominantly non-White. If busy parents see that the test scores say the school is a ‘bad school,’ then the decision, more often than not, is to then not send their child there, but the test scores are not a reflection of what happens inside the school building. The test scores are a reflection of opportunities that students have had outside of school.”
There are currently programs in Boston that work to confront this dire situation. One that is unique to the area is the Metropolitan Council For Educational Opportunity program, or METCO for short. This program is a voluntary integration program in which students of color in Boston who are initially students under the Boston Public Schools system are taken to higher quality White-majority schools in the suburbs. This program has high success rates for the students it assists, specifically in increasing their academic achievement.
Despite its ability to improve academic performance, however, there have been many critiques of the program. In an interview with HPR, Harvard student and METCO alum Angie Gabeau ‘25 explained that such a program was not a valid alternative for systemic change within the educational system. “There [are] still kids in Boston who are not going to great schools,” Gabeau argued. “Pushing them into different districts is not really helping because the majority of kids are still suffering in their own towns.” Despite her reservations, she shared that the program was highly beneficial to her academically. Gabeau added that peers from her hometown ended up in different places in life from her due to their vastly different access to educational support.
Fields paralleled Gabeau’s thoughts that the program distracts from addressing deeper issues with Boston schools. “We move away from really taking the political will at the resources and implement quality programs within Boston public schools so our children do not have to ride for two or three hours on a bus to access the kinds of course offerings and programs that every child deserves, regardless of where they live.” Programs like METCO aren’t enough to fix the problems with segregation in Boston.
School segregation needs to be tackled head-on rather than diverted by simply investing money into voluntary integration programs. We need to take into account how private funds disproportionately benefit wealthier and Whiter schools. We need to ensure that students of color have equal access to quality educators, resources, and institutions. We need to rework the Boston school assignment system which presently exacerbates school segregation. Most importantly, we need to get at the root of the issue: residential segregation.
Without integrating our communities, we cannot truly integrate our schools. There needs to be a greater focus on furthering inclusionary housing policy and reversing institutionally-built exclusionary housing policies. Some options include getting rid of exclusionary single-family zoning policies, which doesn’t allow multi-family housing like apartments from being built on residential land. Inclusionary housing policies include new developments setting aside cheaper housing for low-income to moderate-income families. There are a plethora of ways the city can invest into making each neighborhood as diverse as Boston is in its totality. Combatting school and residential segregation is required if we are to rewrite the future of America in a manner that upholds the principles of equity and dignity for all.
