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GLOBE EDITORIAL
Regionwide segregationBOSTON IS LOSING the school desegregation battle. Even as city schools make academic strides to help students pass the MCAS, many do so in educational ghettoes defined by race, language, and income. Academic achievement in suburban public schools is better, but racial isolation is even more extreme.
The contrast between city and suburban school systems in Greater Boston is not news, but a new study dresses the issue in stark statistics. Boston, for instance, educates 44 percent of all the black public school students in the region but only 2 percent of whites. Many schools are racially stacked. More than a quarter of black students attend schools where the black enrollment exceeds 90 percent. And -- amazingly -- seven in 10 white students attend schools where 90 percent of their peers are white. This lack of diversity is damaging to whites as well as blacks, a point made by Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, who led the new study. Another troubling issue is poverty -- 97 percent of intensely segregated minority schools have a majority of students eligible for free or reduced lunch, while in the intensely segregated white schools, only 1 percent are similarly poor. Poorer, high-minority schools lose out. Their students are less likely to finish high school and do worse on the MCAS. According to the Harvard study, 96 percent of students in low-poverty, low-minority schools passed the English portion of the 10th-grade MCAS tests. Only 61 percent pass in high-poverty, high-minority schools. The good news is that Boston's metropolitan area has the raw material to increase integration. One Boston solution is Metco, a program that sends minority students to suburban schools, increasing diversity for white students and opening up academic opportunities for minorities. But Metco is limited by its small size and funding. It can and should be expanded. But ultimately it's a one-way solution that doesn't help city schools. Boston should also beef up fair housing practices and work with the real estate industry to show clients an array of neighborhoods. The city needs more innovative schools that would pull families into the city. The Boston Arts Academy high school does this. Its student population is 23.9 percent white, 49.7 percent black, 24.7 percent Hispanic, and 1.3 percent Asian. Orfield points to diversity at schools in Cambridge and Lynn.
The Foley Hoag Foundation was the lead funder of the study in hopes other foundations will use it to guide funding of effective projects. City, state, and federal leaders must also act. It's a matter of civic maturity to move beyond segregation and prepare students to excel in an increasingly diverse world. |
