TWO YEARS AFTER state data showed that almost two-thirds of Massachusetts schools are racially segregated, a new lawsuit is both a plea for Bay State education officials to step in and, advocates say, a chance to reckon with why these patterns persist decades after busing began shuttling students across district lines.

This week on The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon reporter Jennifer Smith talked with Dan O’Brien, professor of public policy and urban affairs and director of the Boston Area Research Initiative at Northeastern University, about what Boston’s long record of trying to address school segregation can illustrate about the effectiveness of desegregation efforts.

“I think the big lesson of the 1970s desegregation movement was that at the end of the day, everybody – white people, people of color, rich people, low-income people – everybody wants access to a high-quality school that is, in fact, close to their home,” O Brien said. “No one really wants to have to go all the way across the city to access education.”

Let alone the state. The suit, filed by a coalition of students and community organizations, comes decades into the METCO program that buses students from certain parts of Boston into suburban districts, and argues that generally tying school assignment to residence in a state where neighborhoods are deeply divided by race and income amounts to state-maintained segregation.

Some possible remedies from the coalition include expanding METCO, working to attract a diverse array of students through inter-district magnet schools and regional vocational technical schools, and attracting diverse families with more investment in buildings and infrastructure in poorer districts.

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s response acknowledged the disparity and pointed to efforts to monitor and address segregation, but said it does not have the authority to change school district boundaries or allow cross-district enrollment.

The lawsuit has already opened a broader conversation about what, if anything, works to desegregate and improve access to quality education.

O’Brien was brought in by Boston to evaluate its 2014 Home-Based Assignment Plan, a redesigned lottery system that used an algorithm to guarantee every student access to high-quality schools near their home.

“Most of our high-quality schools in Boston are in historically white, historically affluent neighborhoods,” O’Brien said. In neighborhoods like Mattapan, students had no access to top-tier schools within a few miles. Where high-quality schools did exist in communities of color, more families were competing for fewer seats. The proximity model on its own encoded existing inequities rather than correcting them.

His research also found a point of diminishing returns: Once a school was more than about two miles away, families largely stopped considering it, regardless of quality. “They’re consistently trading this off,” O’Brien said.

“I’ve definitely had colleagues and friends and families in those communities say, why can’t we just have high-quality schools here?” he said. “We don’t want our kids necessarily to have to go to some other neighborhood that we don’t necessarily have a connection to — that’s going to be long-distance travel. It makes all sorts of difficulties with access. It makes difficulties sometimes with being a part of sports teams or other clubs after school. It makes a difference with feeling included in the community that you’re traveling to.”

“Nobody,” he said, “is loving that that solution.”

The lawsuit attempts what O’Brien called “a fascinating legal pirouette” by extending the logic of intra-district desegregation orders up to the state level, in a system where each town retains jurisdiction over its own schools.

“I hope that it actually transitions from a legal discussion into a policy discussion, and does so rather quickly,” O’Brien said.

On the episode, they discuss Boston’s plan and its findings (2:00), the distinction between racial and income-based remedies (21:30), and what the lawsuit might realistically accomplish (30:00).