ON WEDNESDAY, a team of litigators filed a lawsuit on behalf of students from Boston and several Gateway Cities arguing that the stark segregation of schools by race and income violates the Massachusetts Constitution’s guarantee of an adequate public education for all students.

The first school desegregation case in a generation caught many by surprise, though it should not have—Massachusetts has some of the highest income segregation in the nation along with the largest and fastest-growing achievement gaps in the US.

There is overwhelming evidence that concentrating low-income students in high-poverty schools is the leading driver of socioeconomic disparities in educational outcomes. Still, some may question whether now is the right time to pursue what could become a divisive and lengthy court battle. This hesitancy assumes the only viable solution will be zero-sum: busing urban and suburban students into better- and worse-performing schools.

To be clear, the plaintiffs have not proposed this kind of two-way busing as the primary remedy. They are mostly calling for more vocational schools and regional magnet schools that will voluntarily bring students together across district lines. This approach has merit for high school students, who have much to gain from traveling beyond the borders of their neighborhoods. At this crucial stage of identity formation, they can develop independence, mix with peers from other backgrounds, and attend larger schools with more to offer.

However, moving students out of their neighborhoods is not the solution for the roughly 150,000 low-income Massachusetts students in segregated K-8 schools. Primary schools are crucial “social infrastructure.” They are where we form relationships that are pivotal to both individual and community growth and resilience. Proximity is particularly important if we want parents to have the ability to engage and contribute fully to their schools.

That argues for a very different approach to deep-seated segregation than the various cross-district enrollment proposals that have been raised. First and foremost, Massachusetts should focus its desegregation efforts on making urban neighborhoods with high-poverty schools great places for families from all economic backgrounds to raise children. Not only will this approach give children from low-income backgrounds the opportunities they need to develop to their full potential, it will also put Massachusetts in a far better position to retain middle-class families, who are exiting the state in droves, mainly because of our exorbitant housing costs.

For years, the MassINC Policy Center has sought to draw attention to the costs of school segregation, both in terms of lost human potential, as well as lost opportunity to build more housing in vibrant urban centers with the infrastructure to accommodate growth efficiently, and in a manner that preserves quality of life.

Up until now, making this case felt like screaming into the wind. State education leaders simply ignored us, focusing their attention instead on “school turnaround” and other policies that repeatedly failed to produce meaningful reductions in educational disparities.

State housing leaders have done more to acknowledge the Commonwealth’s school segregation and its direct connection to residential segregation in recent years. However, they have focused almost exclusively on helping affordable housing developers build more rental housing in the suburbs—an approach that will never succeed at scale—as opposed to working with urban communities to create more mixed-income neighborhoods.

This long-overdue school desegregation lawsuit may provide the push we need to change the conversation. Fortuitously, it coincides with fresh state leadership.

The Healey administration has brought in a new state education commissioner and secretary of education with deep experience working in urban districts. They both understand the harm segregated schooling imposes and the fallacy that high-poverty schools can do just as well for children if educators just worked harder and believed in their students more.

Meanwhile, last month, the governor appointed Juana Matias to serve as secretary of housing and livable communities. A product of Haverhill and Lawrence who showed a deep interest in education while serving in the Legislature, she is uniquely suited to elevate the “livable communities” portion of her secretariat. Finally, assuming the state does the right thing and works to settle the case, Attorney General Andrea Campbell will bring valuable perspective to the lead negotiator role. She grew up in a Boston marked by concentrated poverty and desegregation gone wrong, and she has long argued for an approach to education reform centered around high-quality schools for every neighborhood.

These leaders should negotiate a two-pronged settlement that will mitigate the harm to students today, while steadily building the schools and communities that will make Massachusetts far stronger in the future.

The interim approach is clear. As the complaint documents, students in high-poverty schools are much more likely to be taught by inexperienced educators. Educator quality is by far the most important school input when it comes to student achievement. The only solution to this problem is to pay teachers significantly more for the more difficult task of working in high-need schools.

Texas is taking this approach and it is clearly having a very positive effect. There are certainly other steps we could take to attempt to mitigate the impact of concentrated poverty, such as providing students with high-dosage tutoring, but with teacher shortages intensifying, reinforcing the educator workforce should be priority number one.

The longer-term solution will take far more commitment and ingenuity, but the spark is already there. Earlier this month, Springfield’s leaders organized a tour of Mason Square to showcase what we call school-centered neighborhood development can look like.

This historic middle-class African American neighborhood has endured decades of disinvestment following redlining. In the past few years, the state has put hundreds of millions of dollars into a new school and new affordable housing developments, but so far there has been no coordinated effort to link these investments to further economic integration. Springfield leaders are now taking a hard look at how they can combine neighborhood planning, housing, and community development efforts with education policies constructed explicitly to create a mixed-income neighborhood and school.

To successfully pursue this coordinated and comprehensive approach, they need a creative and committed state partner. Efforts to get the state to engage in this way got a boost earlier this month when Geoffrey Canada and his leadership team from the widely acclaimed Harlem Children’s Zone came to Beacon Hill and stood with Sen. Sal DiDomenico, Rep. Antonio Cabral, Rep. Kate Lipper-Garabedian, and a host of others advocating for the ENOUGH Act. Modeled on legislation to reduce concentrated poverty in Maryland, the bill would provide resources to place-based initiatives that empower residents and give them the tools they need to build wealth, while working together to improve their neighborhoods and schools.

This long-term approach is the only way to heal neighborhoods and reverse the historic legacy of redlining and other discriminatory policies that produced the segregation we grapple with today. Yes, it will require significant public investment, but in the end, this spending will produce much better returns for Massachusetts taxpayers than the hundreds of millions of dollars sent to urban communities year after year through the state education funding formula based on their low-income enrollment. This state aid does little to mitigate the impact of concentrated poverty and its toll on human capital, and it certainly isn’t creating more great neighborhoods with good public schools that provide everyone with more options.

This last point is key: In past desegregation efforts, battle lines were drawn across communities and the fight was one of “us” versus “them.” We must not let this happen again. Young households are struggling mightily to build a life here because of our high cost of living. An approach focused on making Massachusetts Gateway Cities, with their lower housing costs, great places to raise children for families from all backgrounds could bridge divides.

This is not to say that the integration of these communities will come by importing young adults who were raised in their suburbs. The primary path to creating mixed-income Gateway Cities is ensuring that those raised in these communities choose to stay when they climb the economic ladder. Without generational wealth to help them get started, these are the middle-class households Massachusetts is most at risk of losing. To be sure, there are plenty of young adults from suburban middle-class households also struggling to afford homes in our state, and many will also be drawn to Gateway City neighborhoods that have everything to offer, but we have tools to plan for growth in a manner that can make room for everyone without displacement.

If we follow this blueprint and develop complete communities in our dense urban areas, not only will households save on the items that our latest research on the middle class shows are the big budget busters—housing, taxes, and transportation—families will also save time traveling between jobs, shopping, child care, and schools, a commodity that our research suggests has become just as precious to middle-class households as money.

Savvy political leaders can take advantage of this new litigation to help us all see that school integration is not only a legal — and moral — imperative if we are to meet our constitutional obligation to provide quality education to all, but also a cornerstone in the larger battle for a healthy and growing middle class in our Commonwealth.

Ben Forman is director of the MassINC Policy Center.

Benjamin Forman is MassINC’s research director. He coordinates the development of the organization’s research agenda and oversees production of research reports. Ben has authored a number of MassINC...