Being informed that your state has the highest student achievement in the country while your child attends an underfunded school in one of its poorest cities is a unique kind of irony. Nine students and four community organizations from Springfield, Holyoke, Boston, Lawrence, Brockton, Lynn, and Worcester filed a lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court on Wednesday, focusing on this tension. Even though the legal route is complicated, the main point is straightforward: Black and Latino students are paying the price for Massachusetts’ continued racial segregation in schools.
Lawyers for Civil Rights and Brown’s Promise filed the lawsuit, which challenges the practice of assigning students to schools based only on where they live. This practice is rarely mentioned directly in courteous policy discussions. That sounds neutral on paper. In reality, it serves as something far less neutral in a state where housing patterns have historically divided people based on their income and race. These nine students attend schools in districts that are directly next to wealthier, predominately white districts where they are not allowed to enroll. Sometimes it’s just a street that separates a struggling school from one with adequate resources.
It is difficult to dispute the lawsuit’s numbers. Sixty-three percent of Massachusetts’s schools are classified as segregated or severely segregated, according to a 2024 state advisory council report. In terms of metrics like college enrollment and graduation rates, schools with greater concentrations of students of color performed worse. To put it simply, Jillian Lenson, senior attorney at Lawyers for Civil Rights, stated that the state’s decades-old school conditions are what cause these results rather than the students’ potential. There isn’t much opportunity for bureaucratic diversion in a sentence like that.
As is customary for state agencies, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education responded with a statement outlining its dedication to advancement. It pointed to investments in closing graduation gaps and stated that it does not have the power to alter school district boundaries or force schools to accept students from other districts. The state’s commitment was demonstrated, according to a spokesperson, by Massachusetts’s national ranking on student achievement. It’s possible that Massachusetts performs well overall and has simultaneously permitted a two-tier system to calcify along racial lines. Averages have a tendency to make it difficult to determine whose experience they are truly averaging.
It is important to thoroughly comprehend what the plaintiffs are requesting because it has been misrepresented in previous cases of a similar nature. They do not want court-mandated boundary adjustments or forced busing. That was made clear by Brown’s Promise chief legal counsel GeDá Jones Herbert. The lawsuit requests funding for evidence-based strategies, such as increasing regional magnet programs, improving funding for schools with limited resources, and expanding the voluntary inter-district transfer options that are currently available but are still mainly unavailable. Although the state does have regional vocational schools and transfer programs, equal access is more theoretical than practical due to a complex web of opt-outs and the small scope of most initiatives. As this develops, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the system wasn’t created with the expectation that everyone would use it.
This is not an isolated case. The Latino Action Network filed a similar lawsuit in New Jersey in 2018, arguing that residence-based school assignments were a contributing factor to racial segregation. Since 2015, Minnesota has been battling a similar case. There is currently no sign of a resolution as both are proceeding through state courts. Advocates have increasingly looked to state constitutions, which frequently contain explicit equality and education clauses, as a more viable option than federal courts, where the tools for integration have been gradually reduced since the early 2000s. However, the legal landscape is slow and the results are uncertain. Although governments may not have directly caused residential segregation, Robert Williams, a law professor at Rutgers, has pointed out that the network of district lines and residency requirements they have established around it amounts to a sort of structural endorsement. Massachusetts is currently being asked to respond to that argument.
Cases like this one seem to proceed so slowly that the students who filed will have graduated long before anything changes. That cynicism is justified. However, the data is damning, the lawsuit exists, and for the first time in a long time, a state that has long relied on its reputation for high-quality education is being asked to consider the true beneficiaries of that reputation.
