Hub of hypersegregation

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  April 23, 2004

NEXT MONTH the nation will note the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Judging by Boston, you would barely know the Brown decision existed.

This week the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, which studies patterns of segregation and the benefits of integration, released a study that found that public education in the Boston metropolitan area remains so segregated that project director Gary Orfield said, "The stratification here is just extraordinary."

Within the Boston public schools, white enrollment has dropped from 73 percent in 1967 to 15 percent today. The average African-American student in Boston now attends a school that is 11 percent white, compared with 32 percent white in 1967.

At the same time, in a bitter racial irony, the Boston public schools offer one of the nation's best demonstrations that if a quality school exists, white families will storm the doors down to hoard the spots. Boston Latin, the subject of a lawsuit by a white family that ended in the death of affirmative action there in 1998, is 51 percent white, 28 percent Asian-American, 14 percent African-American, and 6 percent Latino. Boston Latin Academy is 42 percent white, 26 percent African-American, 22 percent Asian, and 11 percent Latino.

This is in a school system that is only 15 percent white. With white families disproportionately locking up the two top schools, most African-American students -- 61 percent -- go to schools that are at least 90 percent students of color.

That is hypersegregation beyond the worst regional and national averages. In the Northeast, 51 percent of African-American students go to schools that are at least 90 percent students of color. Boston's percentage of hypersegregated African-American students is double that of the South, where 31 percent of black students go to such schools.

The numbers really go south when you consider the whole metropolitan area. Boston and Brockton alone account for 55 percent of all of the metropolitan area's African-American students. Boston and Brockton account for only 3 percent of the area's white students. Boston, Lawrence, Chelsea, Worcester, Lowell, and Lynn account for 60 percent of the area's Latino students. Those six cities account for 6 percent of the area's white students.

Four out of every five white students and one out of two Asian-American students go to suburban schools. But only one out of every five African-American students and one out of every four Latino students go to suburban school.

Because of housing patterns, the chances are that the typical white student will have an education among peers who are overwhelmingly white. Between 1989 and 2001, the outer suburbs outside Route 128 added more students to their public school enrollments than Boston, its adjacent small cities, and the suburbs inside Route 128 combined.

The outer suburbs now account for 59 percent of the area's 767,601 students. Ninety-one percent of the students in the outer suburbs are white. "The continued movement of whites to the suburbs and away from more urbanized areas exacerbates the uneven racial distribution of students across the metro area," said the study, written by project researcher Chungmei Lee.

In a meeting this week with the Globe's editorial board, Orfield said the problem is so severe that any serious solutions should be regional, not local. That would take a legal attack on the Supreme Court's Milliken v. Bradley decision in 1974, which declared that the Detroit suburbs did not have to participate in desegregation plans even though white flight was clearly resegregating the schools in a regional manner.

In his biting dissent in that case, Justice Thurgood Marshall warned that Milliken was "a giant step backwards" that guaranteed that "Negro children in Detroit will receive the same separate and inherently unequal education in the future as they have been unconstitutionally afforded in the past."

Marshall's worst fears were realized. Seventy-seven percent of white students in the outer suburbs go to a school that is at least 90 percent white. Nationally, 88 percent of schools that are less than 10 percent white are high poverty schools. In the Boston area, the percentage is an astounding 97 percent. Only 1 percent of schools that are over 90 percent white are high poverty.

Despite the state's demand that all students pass the same standardized tests, segregated schools still lead to segregated teaching. In Boston area schools where fewer than 10 percent of the students are poor or of color, 94 percent of the teachers are certified in the courses they teach. In schools of high poverty and percentages of African-American and Latino students, the percentage of certified teachers drops to 78.

In 1954 the Brown decision outlawed locally segregated schools. In 1974, the Milliken decision essentially legalized regional segregation. Boston is a sordid example of what happens amid a wimpy national commitment to equal education. The state of the schools screams for another Brown decision. Only something that monumental can break the silence of modern segregation.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.