By Michael Jonas
To borrow from a certain sage of the ’60s, you don’t need a demographer to know the racial breakdown of Boston and Springfield area schools. But a study such as that released earlier this week by a Northeastern University research team can nonetheless give firm documentation to what’s visible in plain sight: schooling in the two regions is highly segregated.
The study, which examined the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the US, ranked the Springfield area second and Boston fourth when it comes to the degree of segregation faced by Latino students. For segregation of black students, the two Massachusetts areas ranked ninth and 28th, respectively.
A front-page Boston Globe story on the study featured some of the obligatory handwringing over the situation – “It just shows the work we need to do,” said one ACLU lawyer. But none of the lamentations will much matter if there is no political will to address the primary causes of school segregation in Massachusetts: the stark segregation of communities by income and the lack of regional school districts in urban areas of the state.
Increasing funding for the METCO program and building more affordable housing in suburbs might improve the situation at the margins. But unless the good liberals of Lexington and other suburban school districts are prepared to embrace the idea of a metropolitan school district, any talk of the need to address school segregation will remain just that.
