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April, 2004
Two reports by Chungmei Lee and
Joseph Berger et al.
The Metro Boston Equity Initiative is devoted to analyzing
race relations and racial equity issues not simply in the city of
Boston, but across the entire metropolitan region. Although greater
Boston still has a large white majority and suburban sectors with
very little diversity, immigration of Latinos and Asians is driving
the region’s growth, and much of this population increase
is taking place well outside of the city limits. Changing patterns
of school enrollment provide a good sense of the region’s
near-term future.
Americans see schools as the key to the future and
educational opportunity as the chief means of making a very unequal
society fairer. For decades, education has become an increasingly
important determinant of employment and earnings, which, in turn,
strongly
affect life chances of families and their children. The schools
of metropolitan Boston are
highly segregated, as described in the Initiative’s first
report by John Logan. Chungmei Lee, in Racial Segregation and Educational
Outcomes in Metropolitan Boston, further explores the relationship
between segregation, location within the metropolitan area and the
success of schools in terms of test scores, in graduating students
and in obtaining qualified teachers. Joseph Berger’s report,
Race and Metropolitan Origins of Postsecondary Access to Four Year
Colleges: The Case of Greater Boston, analyzes the relationships
between race, residential location and preparation for college,
as measured by patterns of taking the SAT exam, test scores achieved,
and patterns of applications to colleges and universities. These
reports paint a picture of a highly stratified set of opportunities
in which Boston and the satellite cities offer very different paths
in terms of high school success and college access than do the overwhelmingly
white suburbs. These patterns exist after years of intense focus
on the two panaceas of the conservative movement—high stakes
testing and market competition from charter schools and choice mechanisms.
Although those strategies almost always produce apparent gains on
state testing programs, we see no signs anywhere in our work-- on
resegregation, testing, and No Child Left Behind--that they are
likely to make major changes in these patterns.
Boston’s disastrous failure to achieve peaceful
desegregation of its schools three decades ago, particularly the
mob violence at South Boston High School, and the transition of
the Boston schools to overwhelmingly white enrollment, are commonly
seen as areas why the region need not think about patterns of school
segregation--nothing can be done about it. This thinking ignores
the better experiences of many other cities and also the METCO program
that is intact and still in high demand. In fact, Boston had what
was probably the worst leadership in the country in making a transition
to desegregated schools, and its white enrollment did indeed decline
rapidly. But it is also true that other parts of the metropolitan
area have had far better experiences with desegregation. Further,
the racial compositions of many central cities that never had any
significant desegregation plan are now very similar to that of Boston’s.
In other words, there are better options—apparent, for example,
in Lynn and Cambridge. Both are highly diverse school districts
with considerable lasting desegregation, and white enrollment decline
is primarily a matter of spreading housing segregation. It is surely
wrong to focus too much attention on the city of Boston, which serves
only a twelfth of the region’s students, less than half of
black students, nearly a fourth of Latino students, and only one
white student in fifty.
The racial destiny of the region is going to be worked
out on a metropolitan scale. The first step is to recognize the
housing segregation reported and analyzed in our earlier reports
and the powerful relationships between intense school segregation
and the educational chances that exist today.
Describing these patterns obviously does not show
causation or demonstrate how much change would occur if neighborhoods
and schools were less segregated. In a society where educational
opportunity is the only real opportunity for most children, however,
these patterns are so stark that they cannot be safely ignored.
There are better options for school and housing policy, and the
cost of inaction will continually grow as more and more suburban
communities are affected and as the city continues to lose the opportunities
for integrated education that could be produced in gentrifying neighborhoods
with the right kinds of schools and school leadership. The surveys
we have done of students in integrated schools in Cambridge and
Lynn portray very positive reactions to integrated education by
members of the rising generation. This metropolitan region could
surely expand those opportunities.
Gary Orfield
Racial
Segregation and Educational Outcomes in Metropolitan Boston
by Chungmei Lee
(In PDF Format) 
Race
and the Metropolitan Origins of Postsecondary Access to Four Year
Colleges: The Case of Greater Boston
by Joseph B. Berger, Suzanne M. Smith and Stephen P. Coelen
(In PDF Format)
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