NJ Schools Racially 'Segregated,' Report Says: Is Your School?

A recently released report says that New Jersey schools are increasingly "segregated," providing a map that shows whether each school district is racially diverse – or not (click on your district to find out more on the map below).

The May 2018 report from Center for Diversity and Equality in Education says that 25 percent of public school students attend classes that almost complete comprised of white or nonwhite students, according to the report.

The report, "New Promise of School Integration and the Old Problem of Extreme Segregation: An Action Plan for New Jersey," comes from a nonprofit group headed by Paul Tractenberg, a former Rutgers University law professor.

The report is a follow-up to the group's 2013 study, "New Jersey’s Apartheid and Intensely Segregated Schools: Powerful Evidence of an Inefficient and Unconstitutional State Education System."

"Our initial work on the update revealed that the proportion of apartheid and intensely segregated schools in New Jersey has actually grown since the last publication," according to the report.

Curiously, a considerable number of the state’s school districts, and their municipalities, have also become substantially diverse, according to the report.

"Perhaps that should not have come as a surprise since we also discovered that New Jersey’s total student population is very diverse and closely mirrors that of the nation," according to the report.

In the report, the group documents each school district's current state of diversity – or lack of it – and recommends how the state should address the situation.

Those include:

• Recognizing and acting urgently to deal with the continuing, or even worsening, extreme segregation that exists in approximately 25 percent of school districts.
• Dealing with the significant, but sharply declining, number of districts where white students exist in extreme isolation (fewer than 10 percent non-white students). "Both circumstances diminish the educational and social opportunities of far too many New Jersey students, and deprive the state as a whole of the benefits of students educated in schools that mirror our society’s growing diversity," the report said.

Here is the group's map, which identifies the racial and ethnic proportion of each district's student body, and whether the classrooms are sufficiently diverse – or not:

Read the whole report here.

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