Fifty years ago, Massachusetts became a national test case for equity in schools, after riots erupted over policies meant to undo decades of harmful segregation. Courts had ordered the state to bus students across Boston neighborhoods to integrate schools. While the policy remained fraught, by the mid-1980s, a federal appeals court proclaimed schools here as desegregated as was reasonably possible.
Today, Massachusetts ranks among the best states in the country for public education. Boston switched to a “home-based” model in 2014 that claimed to give all families access to high-performing schools without the commute. Even as student test scores have plunged nationwide, public schools in the state continue to make top grades in math and reading.
But a lawsuit filed in May says the challenge of segregation is not over.
Why We Wrote This
Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, students in the Bay State are suing. They say they face segregated school districts with fewer resources, including weaker curriculum and less experienced teachers.
Nine students, represented by their guardians, along with four nonprofit groups, have sued Massachusetts, saying the commonwealth had denied schoolchildren the right to an adequate education and to equal protection under the law. They argue that the state maintains “racially segregated school districts characterized by concentrated poverty that deny Black and Latino students an adequate and equal education and undermine the State’s civic and economic future.” And they demand a fix to what the lawsuit calls a “two-tiered” system that “has enormous negative consequences.”
The case reflects challenges that go well beyond the Bay State. More than 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, when the Supreme Court ruled that separating students on the basis of race is unconstitutional, large school districts across the country are segregated by both race and economics.
In 2024, researchers at Stanford University and the University of Southern California found that segregation between white and Black students in the country’s 100 largest school districts had risen 64% since 1988. Segregation by economic status has also increased by about 50 percent since 1991, they discovered. (At the same time, most school districts in the country are far less segregated than they were 60 years ago, researchers found.) More than one-third of students attended a school where over 75% of the student body was one race or ethnicity during the 2021-22 school year, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Policymakers, educators and families recognize that achievement gaps often parallel these economic and racial data. Separate lawsuits from Minnesota and New Jersey, filed in 2015 and 2018, respectively, remain ongoing.
In Massachusetts, a 2024 report from the state’s Racial Imbalance Advisory Council (RIAC) classified 63% of public schools here as either “segregated” or “intensely segregated,” which they defined as 71% white or nonwhite or 90% white or nonwhite. Intensely segregated white schools averaged a 66.3% performance score on state accountability data, compared with just 18.7% for intensely segregated non-white schools. High school graduation rates were 93% at nearly all-white schools, versus 72% at schools where children of color make up more than 90% of the student body, according to the council.
“If you are a Black or Latino student who comes from a low-income or underpaid family, your educational prospects – before you have even begun – are severely limited,” says Raul Fernandez, a senior lecturer at Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.
Across the country, students are assigned to schools largely based upon where that child’s family lives. Because public schools are predominately funded by property taxes and state money, in general, lower-income communities have schools with less money. And because lower-income areas are disproportionately Black and Latino, this means that children of color have a disproportionate likelihood of an under-resourced education.
Massachusetts policymakers have tried in myriad ways to address what they agree is a problem. Since 2019, the state has funneled more than $1 billion into public schools through the Student Opportunity Act, which aimed to increase aid to districts with the highest need. The state has also created programs to address gaps in graduation rates, diversify the public school workforce, and reduce dropout rates and absenteeism.
“All students, no matter their income level, race/ethnicity, language, or disability, deserve schools where they are known, valued, and have the support they need to succeed,” Jacqueline Reis, a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the state agency overseeing K-12 learning, wrote in a statement.
But the department also says it lacks authority to change school district boundaries or to force students to enroll in other districts.
State law gives students the right to attend public school in the town where they reside, free of charge. At the same time, schools generally do not have to accept students who live outside the town’s district. In most cases, school district boundaries mirror municipal borders. A resident of Boston, for example, has a legal right to attend schools in Boston, but not in a neighboring city such as Cambridge.
And across municipal borders, the quality of curricula can vary widely.
In Brockton, for instance, a school district near Boston where 83% of students are Black or Latino, about 42% of 11th and 12th grade students complete an advanced course. In bordering Easton, where 72% of students are white, the share that completes advanced coursework is 70%, according to state data.
“You can throw funding at these schools in separate settings, but really being able to address the integration issue – to desegregate these schools – is really what will help move the ball forward,” says Andrea Watson, an attorney for the nonprofit Brown’s Promise, which filed the lawsuit with Lawyers for Civil Rights.
But not all education experts agree. Charles Glenn, a professor emeritus at Boston University’s Wheelock College, sees no reason that schools serving mostly Black or Latino students can’t provide a quality education.
“I’m not knocking desegregation. I think desegregation is important for societal reasons,” says Dr. Glenn, who spent two decades as director of urban education and equity efforts for the state’s education department. “That said, I think we too easily insist that unless we can put Black kids in school with white kids, we can’t provide top-rate education for them.
“I would urge those who are concerned about real opportunity for Black and Latino kids to focus on making schools more effective,” he adds.
Scholars have long criticized the country’s reliance on property taxes to fund schools. Property taxes accounted for 52% of public school funding in Massachusetts during the 2021-22 school year, according to federal data, making the state’s schools some of the most property-tax-reliant in the country.
Even if low-income areas had higher taxes, “by sheer nature of lower property tax wealth, you’re not going to garner as much local revenue,” says Ericka Weathers, who studies educational equity at University of Pennsylvania.
The Massachusetts plaintiffs propose some solutions, including establishing cross-district magnet schools and expanding existing programs such as the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity. Founded in 1966 to reduce school segregation in Boston, METCO buses students from the urban cities of Boston and Springfield to nearby suburban districts. But it currently serves only 0.35% of public school students, according to the lawsuit.
Dr. Fernandez says that, regardless of how Massachusetts addresses segregation, it must recognize its responsibility to the children who live here.
“We need the state to step in and make what I call generational investments in these communities,” he says. “These are the commonwealth’s kids. … We’re responsible for all of them.”