A TALE OF TWO DEEPLY DIVIDED NEW JERSEY PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEMS
The state is home to one school system that is urban and populated by poor students of color; another, suburban and populated by well-to-do white students
- Professor Paul Tractenberg.
In October, a report was released about racial segregation in New Jersey schools, jointly written by the Institute on Law and Policy at Rutgers-Newark and the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. The findings were sobering, even for a state that has long been home to some of the most segregated schools in the country.
As we near the 60th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board desegregation ruling, one of the chief authors of the report, Rutgers Law School professor Paul Tractenberg, discusses some of its findings and some possible remedies as New Jersey moves into 2014.
Despite a well-funded and politically influential campaign to label New Jersey public schools as expensive failures, on average they actually perform very well in comparison to other states’ systems. The deep and distressing problems become apparent only when one goes beneath the averages. Then, what emerge are two fundamentally different educational systems.
One, the predominantly white, well-to-do and suburban system, performs at relatively high levels, graduating and sending on to higher education most of its students. The other, the overwhelmingly black, Latino, and poor urban system,