How segregated are New Jersey's schools and what can be done about it?

New Jersey is one of the country's most diverse states, but many school districts don't reflect the makeup of the counties where they are located, and the resulting divide has left many students learning in a racial bubble.

A Record analysis found that school segregation is most extreme in three northeastern counties — Passaic, Essex and Union. The divide in these counties stands out because of their large minority populations and wide disparities in wealth and poverty.

But North Jersey isn't alone. Segregated districts are found across the state, especially in cities such as Paterson, Newark, Trenton and Camden, where children go to schools where white students are virtually absent. Often, districts just a few miles apart have vastly different income levels and ratios of white and minority students. 

Look up the racial makeup and poverty rate of your district here.

Having surveyed this landscape, a coalition of advocacy groups and families has sued New Jersey and the state Board of Education, calling for the state to take steps to end "de facto" segregation in its public schools.

The advocates, who filed the lawsuit in June, say they are trying to undo years of policies that helped create what has been described as one of the most segregated school systems in the country. Today, nearly half of the state's 585,000 black and Latino students go to schools that are more than 90 percent non-white, according to the lawsuit.

Overall, New Jersey is the sixth most segregated state in the nation for black students, and seventh for Latino students, according to a study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. 

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These kinds of divides can limit opportunities for students, according to the coalition, which includes advocacy and faith groups and parents of school-age children from Paterson, Hoboken, Highland Park, Newark, Union City, Camden and Elizabeth.

They say integration has educational and social benefits, and that the state constitution explicitly prohibits segregation in public schools. They have proposed remedies including the creation of magnet schools that draw from multiple towns and districts, or allowing black and Latino students to attend schools outside their home districts while giving financial incentives for the districts that take them. 

Under a third proposed solution, called “regional controlled choice,” students would rank their preferred schools, and schools would weigh diversity in admissions.  

What is the racial makeup of your school district?

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But the political will to change the school system could be hard to muster in a state where people identify closely with their hometown schools and where even the suggestion of sharing services across municipal boundaries can spark opposition. When faced with the prospect of mergers in the past, for reasons unrelated to race, most communities have balked, citing an unwillingness to share power, shift tax burdens and break from tradition.

Critics also argue that educational quality should not be based on race, and some worry that children from lower-income households will disrupt learning — notions that many reject as rooted in racism or fear.

Courtney Wicks, one of the parents who joined the lawsuit, said she hopes people will get past negative opinions and "false narratives" about minorities and welcome change.

“There is this notion that kids of color can’t learn on the same level and you have to water down the curriculum to accommodate them, or that they’re predisposed to violence and poverty makes them this way," Wicks said. "There are so many false narratives."

Her father, she said, was part of the first African-American class to integrate Louisiana State University more than 50 years ago. She said she can’t believe she’s fighting today for the right of children like her 14-year-old daughter to attend racially mixed schools. 

“I have to believe we are better today,” said Wicks, 40, of Hoboken. “In New Jersey, we’re supposed to be a progressive state, a blue state. I’ve got to believe people will fly with their higher angels on this and sit down and learn all the facts and try not to get caught up in hysteria.”  

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Where segregation runs deepest

Formal segregation was abolished decades ago. Today, the divisions in New Jersey's schools are the product of decades of de facto segregation caused by housing and zoning discrimination, and reinforced by a state law that requires public school students to attend school in the municipality where they live, the advocates and families who sued New Jersey and the state Education Department say.

The Record used a common measure of segregation, called the dissimilarity index, to examine the concentration of different racial groups, as well as Hispanic residents, in school districts across each of the state’s 21 counties. The analysis found that while segregation has eased across most of the state since 2000, the highest levels remain in Passaic, Essex and Union counties.

The most extreme divides were found when comparing black versus white students.

In urban areas like Paterson, Newark and Union, minorities make up at least 90 percent of district enrollment. The analysis found instances where towns that shared a border or are located just a few miles apart were largely white and had far fewer children living below the poverty line. 

• In Paterson, 67 percent of students are Hispanic and 22 percent are black. Wayne, which borders Paterson to the west, is 11 percent Hispanic and 1 percent black. 
• Passaic City schools are 93 percent Hispanic and 4 percent black. Neighboring Hasbrouck Heights is 26 percent Hispanic and 3 percent black. Nearby Wood-Ridge is 24 percent Hispanic and 5 percent black. 
• Prospect Park is 73 percent Hispanic and 14 percent black. Neighboring North Haledon is 12 percent Hispanic and 3 percent black.
• The West Orange school district is 31 percent Hispanic and 38 percent black. Neighboring Essex Fells is 5 percent Hispanic and 3 percent black, while Millburn, which also borders West Orange, is 5 percent Hispanic and 2 percent black.
• Newark is 48 percent Hispanic and 42 percent black. Glen Ridge, about 10 miles away, is 6 percent Hispanic and 4 percent black. 

Segregation isn't only a black-white or Hispanic-white divide. Districts like South Brunswick, Edison and Palisades Park are heavily Asian, reflecting an influx of families in those areas from South Korea and India. New immigrants often settle in ethnic enclaves because of their common culture and extensive support networks.

But overall, the racial division that exists today is no accident, advocates say. Rather, they say, segregation is a product of decades of government policy, including the creation of public housing that concentrated poor people in cities and a federal policy called "redlining" that denied loans to African-Americans and to residents of minority neighborhoods. Although the official policy ended in 1968, in practice many lenders and insurers continued to refuse services to minorities.

"I think it’s really important to understand that the segregation that we have in New Jersey is not product of chance or purely of choice," said Elise Boddie, a civil rights lawyer and a founding member of the New Jersey Coalition for Diverse and Inclusive Schools, which filed the lawsuit. "The federal policy was a policy that persisted for decades that refused to ensure mortgages in racially mixed neighborhoods." 

The coalition behind the lawsuit says integration efforts not unlike the ones they are proposing have succeeded in other places, including a 1971 court-ordered merger of the Morristown and Morris Township districts, and magnet programs in Hartford, Connecticut, that have attracted large numbers of suburban students. 

Still, efforts to integrate schools across the nation have been met with opposition ever since the Supreme Court, in its Brown v. Board of Education decision, struck down "separate-but-equal" segregation in public education 64 years ago.

Critics of court-ordered integration in past cases have said they don't want to lose representation in their school district, or that they identify so closely with their hometown schools that they don't want their children to go elsewhere. 

Over the past 36 years, New Jersey has seen only five instances of voter-approved regionalization, according to a report issued in February by the New Jersey School Boards Association.

Love of home rule, fears of schools closing and other changes, and community pride in a school were factors in opposing plans to create regional schools. But the deal-breakers involved potential shifts in the tax burden, impact on state and federal aid, and increased employment costs, according to the report.

Local ties to schools 

Courtney Wicks grew up in Wayne and was one of only two black students in her graduating class at Wayne Hills High School. She didn’t want that for her daughter, Mackenzie, and chose to move to Hoboken because of its diversity, she said. The Hoboken district is 44 percent Hispanic, 37 percent white and 14 percent black.

“She’s going to grow up in an economy that’s global,” Wicks said, adding that she believes that children who are exposed to different points of view “tend to be better equipped to solve problems and think critically." 

Advocates say low-income black and Hispanic students who attend racially and economically diverse schools are more likely to achieve higher test scores and grades, graduate from high school, and attend and graduate from college.

Diversity also helps all students by exposing them to children of different backgrounds and preparing them to function and work in an increasingly diverse society, they argue. 

But critics say the success of a school cannot be determined by race, and that forced integration may be illegal. 

"The law is clear that if you are drawing district lines or assigning students to schools in order to meet racial quotas, that is itself illegal and it should be," said Roger Clegg, president and general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank devoted to issues of race and ethnicity. 

"I think what decision makers should do is make school assignment decisions without regard to race — make decisions on what’s going to result in kids getting the best education possible and not to reach politically-correct quotas," he said.

Plans requiring integration could hurt students, Clegg said. Forcing students to attend school a long way from where they live, he said, could make it harder for them to participate in extracurricular activities or for their parents to get involved in schools, Clegg said. 

Gary Stein, a former New Jersey Supreme Court justice and chairman of the New Jersey Coalition for Diverse and Inclusive Schools, which filed the lawsuit, said that while children can't be assigned to school by race, schools can consider socioeconomic factors. In fact, the lawsuit challenges segregation by both race and income while noting high poverty rates in urban districts. 

The coalition said it wants the state to adopt incentives for families to voluntarily send their students to more mixed schools. For schools facing declining enrollment, an influx of new students and tax dollars could help keep them open and thriving. But if that's unsuccessful, the coalition will seek "a more muscular option" that could involve transfers of students. 

Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, said the presence of many small school districts in New Jersey — the state has 678 districts in total — could be an advantage because students would not necessarily have to travel far to attend a different school.

New Jersey could also expand and revise an existing, but little-used, program known as the Interdistrict Public School Choice Program to promote diversity, she said. The program enables approved districts to educate students who do not live within their boundaries at no cost to their parents.

"There are smart ways to do this that could be presented to the public as a win-win and that we’re not taking away from that district but actually going to give you more resources," she said. 

Jennifer Torres of Camden hopes there will be more options for her son, Maison, who will enter the seventh grade this fall. Maison has mostly As in school, said Torres, who joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff.

When her daughter was in high school in Camden, substitute teachers often led classes because of staffing shortages, Torres said. The district, which has struggled with low graduation rates and performances on standardized tests, was taken over by the state in 2013.

Torres wants a different experience for her son, a bright child who loves to read and whose favorite subjects are math and history. 

"Even on days they don't have school, he wants to go to school," Torres said. "He wants to be president when he gets older."

She hopes he can earn a scholarship to the Moorestown Friends school, a Quaker day school in Camden County. If that doesn't happen, there's another option, but it's one that she hates to think about.

"The other option is to give custody to his dad," said Torres, adding that Maison's father lives in Pennsauken. "It's something his dad said. 'He’s not going to high school here.'"

"I know that will be the hardest thing on earth for me to do."

'It's separatism' 

When Yvette Alston-Johnson went to school in Paterson in the 1970s, her friends included girls of different races. But nowadays, her grandchildren who attend city schools can go a whole year without having a class with a white child, she said.

“It’s upsetting to me because even though I know no school is perfect, having that kind of money and opportunity opens people’s minds,” said Alston-Johnson, a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

She believes school segregation has deprived her grandchildren — eight of whom attend Paterson schools — of resources and learning opportunities that are more easily found in suburban districts. She said their schools are short on supplies and have lacked music and art programs.

"It's sad," she said. "We look at other schools and they have all of that and some but we can't go there."

Beyond that, she is worried about the message that segregation sends. 

“It doesn’t take rocket science to realize why we are apart from white towns,” Alston-Johnson said. “What’s so good about them that they can’t be with us? It’s separatism. It says they’re better than us, we don’t deserve, we are less.”

Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg of Highland Park, also a plaintiff, grew up attending schools that were nearly all white and believes she was at a disadvantage because of it. She wants a different experience for her 5-year-old son, who starts kindergarten in the fall. 

“When you work and live and learn alongside people who look different than you, it teaches you to challenge stereotypes you may learn later in life," she said. "It teaches you about racial justice and equality in a way that learning in an all-white classroom just cannot."

Her son will benefit because “he’ll be able to learn from and compete with people who may come from different backgrounds," she said.

Advocates like Elise Boddie, of the New Jersey Coalition for Diverse and Inclusive Schools, said it is an “embarrassment” that New Jersey still grapples with deep segregation in its schools.

"People don't associate segregation with New Jersey. They don’t know what you're talking about when you say segregation," she said. "But we’re more segregated than Alabama and all the states in the former Confederacy." 

Boddie said she doesn't expect "everyone is going to rise up and support this." But she added: "I do know there are parents in the state of New Jersey who want integration options for their children. They understand.

"I think it's a more significant portion of the population than we realize who want the option of sending their kids to a diverse school. The problem is we have a system that makes it very hard for them to do that." 

Email: adely@northjersey.com