Segregated schools? Group challenges where NJ kids go to school, arguing system is biased

In a lawsuit that seeks to end what activists say is de facto segregation in New Jersey’s public and charter schools, a coalition of civil rights and other groups has sued the state to alter the long-standing practice of sending students almost exclusively to districts where they live.

Filed on the 64th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which said “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the suit could force sweeping changes much as ideologically similar cases in the past have directed more state funding to poor school districts and required towns to provide thousands of units of affordable housing.

“We did not support separate and unequal education then, and we will not support separate and unequal education in any form now," Adrienne Sanders of the NAACP New Jersey State Conference, a plaintiff in the case, said during an event Thursday announcing the lawsuit.

The complaint, filed Thursday in state Superior Court in Mercer County, is premised on startling statistics: Although mandatory school segregation is prohibited in New Jersey, roughly 270,000 black and Latino students — nearly half — attend schools that are more than 90 percent non-white. Many of those schools are also marked by high levels of poverty.

Overall, New Jersey ranks sixth among the states in terms of the highest segregation of black students and seventh in segregation of Latinos, according to a UCLA study.

“School segregation harms all students, including white students, by creating homogeneous learning and social environments,” the lawsuit states, adding that black and Latino students who attend racially and socioeconomically diverse schools are more likely to achieve higher test scores and grades and graduate from high school and college.

Story continues below complaint.

A spokesman for Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, expressed support for the goals of the litigation.

“As the head of one of the most diverse states in the nation and on the anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, Governor Murphy believes strongly that we must combat the deeply rooted problem of segregation,” spokesman Dan Bryan said in a statement. “Although we can’t comment on pending litigation, the governor is deeply committed to boosting diversity in our schools."

The plaintiffs in the case, which include the Latino Action Network, the NAACP and several parents and schoolchildren, argue that highly segregated schools violate students’ rights under the state constitution and ask the court to mandate that the Legislature and Department of Education come up with a plan to better integrate schools.

Three remedies endorsed in the lawsuit, all of which have been implemented in other parts of the country, are:

interdistrict desegregation plans that allow black and Latino students to choose to attend schools outside their district of residency;

interdistrict enrollment in themed magnet schools, which often focus on specialized areas of learning; and

“regional controlled choice,” in which students would rank their preferred schools and a coordinating entity would assign them based on their preferences and the larger goal of achieving diverse classrooms.

Behind the lawsuit is the New Jersey Coalition for Diverse and Inclusive Schools, an organization formed in 2016 by more than 20 academics, attorneys and leaders from a range of civil rights, religious and advocacy groups.

The coalition is headed by retired New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Gary Stein and is represented in the case by seasoned litigators Lawrence Lustberg of the Gibbons law firm and Michael Stein, the retired justice’s son, of Pashman Stein Walder Hayden.

A segregated state

The cause of segregation in New Jersey’s schools, according to the suit, is a combination of residential segregation, the design of school districts to be largely contiguous with municipal boundaries and state laws assigning students to schools based on residency.

“Residential segregation in New Jersey reflects the confluence of decades of exclusionary zoning by suburban municipalities throughout New Jersey and the high correlation between race and socioeconomic status,” the lawsuit states.

“Housing that is available to and affordable for lower-income families has been concentrated in certain primarily urban municipalities,” it continues. “And because black and Latino families are overrepresented within the lower socioeconomic strata in the state — and whites are overrepresented within the higher socioeconomic strata — the result is a high degree of racial segregation in New Jersey, primarily but not entirely as between poorer cities, on the one hand, and more affluent suburbs on the other.”

The lawsuit highlights the effect in eight counties where the effect is the starkest. In Passaic County, for example, the student populations of three districts — Passaic, Paterson and Prospect Park — are at least 90 percent non-white with 62 percent or more living in poverty.

In Monmouth County, the student populations of two districts — Asbury Park and Red Bank Borough — are at least 92 percent non-white with 82 percent or more living in poverty.

That is compared with an overall student population during the 2016-17 school year in which roughly 16 percent of New Jersey students were black, 27 percent were Latino, 45 percent were white and 38 percent were low-income.

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A similar level of segregation is found in most of New Jersey’s charter schools, the lawsuit says, because charter schools are required to give priority in enrollment to students in their respective districts, which tend to be segregated to begin with.

"New Jersey needs this lawsuit," Ryan Haygood, president of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, said Thursday, noting that his wife has never had a white student in more than 20 years as a teacher in three Newark public schools.

"There's no amount of goodwill or well wishes or optimism that we can marshal that will accomplish the kind of systemic relief and fundamental transformation that is required," he said.

Advocates are bullish about their chances for success. Gary Stein, the retired chief justice, said that de facto segregation, even if not formalized in law, has repeatedly been held by the New Jersey Supreme Court to violate the state constitution.

“We have the best legal precedents in the whole country for challenging de facto segregation," Stein said.

Email: pugliese@northjersey.com