A group of civil rights advocates sued the state in 2018, arguing the level of racial segregation in New Jersey schools violates students’ rights to integrated schools under the state’s constitution.
With nearly 600 school districts, advocates say the state has too many schools that serve either largely white or largely minority students.
State Superior Court Judge Robert T. Lougy ruled last October that the state had “intentionally failed” to address school segregation, which he called “abhorrent to New Jersey public policy” and “prevalent and persistent across the State.”
The Murphy administration argued in court that the entire education system would need to be “rebuilt brick by brick” to address segregation in the state’s more than 600 school districts.
But most voters haven’t heard anything about the lawsuit, and most don’t think the state is segregated, according to a new poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University .
Among the findings:
- Only 16 percent of state voters knew anything about the school segregation case, and only 17 percent knew New Jersey schools are those in most other states, pollsters found.
- When asked about solutions to New Jersey’s segregated schools, 60 percent of respondents approved of creating regional magnet schools and 52 percent approved of merging adjacent school districts. But, only 35 percent of those polled found it acceptable to require schools to accept students from more diverse districts.
- Among Democrats , 62 percent approved of merging school districts. But, only 42 percent of Republicans said districts should be merged.
“This case has been going on for years, with a lot of it behind closed doors,” said Dan Cassino , professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University , and the executive director of the poll.
“Eventually, though, we’re going to get an announcement that could fundamentally reshape public schools in New Jersey , and it’s going to take a lot of people by surprise,” Cassino said.
New Jersey has the fourth highest concentration of Latino students in segregated schools, with 46 percent of Latino students attending schools that are 90 percent non-white, according to an April report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California-Los Angeles .
New Jersey also ranks seventh in the nation in segregation of Black students, with a high number of Black students attending schools that enroll few white students, according to the UCLA study.
Experts say it could be difficult to create more integrated school districts in a state with more than 600 school districts, many of them serving municipalities that have high populations of one race.
“Schools are a major driver of property values, so messing with the school system is touching the third rail,” Cassino said. “Anything that reduces local control is going to face a lot of opposition.”
The poll found most voters don’t see their local school district as segregated.
Only 9 percent of voters said their local schools are segregated by race, while 79 percent said there’s “a good mix” of students, the poll found. Subgroups of Black or urban voters were more likely to recognize segregation in the schools.
About 24 percent of the state’s schools are either 90 percent white or 90 percent students of color, the majority of them in the latter category, according to state Department of Education data for 2022-23.
“One of the real problems with addressing racial segregation in Jersey schools is that people just do not think it’s happening,” said Cassino. “It’s hard to sell people a solution when they don’t think there’s a problem in the first place.”
Voters appear to be unaware of the segregation of Black students in particular, he said.
“I think people look at their districts and say, ‘There are Asian and Hispanic kids here, so it’s not segregated,’” Cassino said. “But that doesn’t tell us much about, say, the percent of Black students going to schools that are 80 percent or more Black. And we need to acknowledge that segregation here doesn’t hit all racial groups equally, even as Black students are mostly left out.”
Most of those polled said they would support creating regional magnet schools, which would not disrupt the current local school systems. Fewer supported merging school districts.
One reason mergers are challenging: about 38 percent of those polled said their school district is better than their neighboring ones, while only 12 percent think neighboring towns had better schools.
“If you think your schools are worse than the schools next door, a merger might seem like a good thing,” said Cassino. “But people are much more likely to think that their schools are better, so a merger would mean trading down.”
Only 35 percent of respondents approved of requiring schools to accept transfers from more diverse school districts.
Other possible solutions include building new schools to attract diverse students, improving vocational schools that draw students from many districts, and consolidating K-8 and K-6 districts into K-12 districts that would have more opportunities for integration among their schools.
“There are a lot of steps to take, a lot of different programs, but no one solution,” David Sciarra , former head of the executive director of the Education Law Center , a non-profit group studying school funding equity, said last year.
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