Seventy-nine percent of New Jersey residents do not believe the state’s public schools are more segregated than those in other states. This belief contradicts NJ’s current status of having the fourth highest percentage of Latino students in the country who attend schools that are at least 90% non-white and the seventh-highest concentration of Black students who attend schools that are at least 90% non-white.

In addition, a new poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University shows that 65% of NJ voters know nothing about a current statewide court case, Latino Action Network v. the State of NJ, that argues intense school segregation violates students’ constitutional rights. and, therefore, the state must implement a variety of remedies. These include mandating the consolidation of school districts as well as expanding county magnet schools and our tiny Interdistrict Public School Choice Program, where parents can opt for seats in nearby districts that are under-enrolled.

Other plaintiffs suing the state, along with the Latino Action Network, are  NAACP New Jersey State Conference, Latino Coalition, the Urban League of Essex County, the United Methodist Church of Greater New Jersey, and several minors.

“Schools are a major driver of property values, so messing with the school system is touching the third rail,” said Dan Cassino, Professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the Executive Director of the FDU Poll. “Anything that reduces local control is going to face a lot of opposition.” He adds, “one of the real problems with addressing racial segregation in Jersey schools is that people just do not think it’s happening. It’s hard to sell people a solution when they don’t think there’s a problem in the first place.”

The lawsuit, brought in 2018, has slowly has made its way through the court system. The State has argued that it cannot be held responsible that housing-pattern segregation is reflected in district demographics. In October of last year, Jersey Superior Court Judge Robert Lougy rejected that argument, writing

“[H]ome rule and neighborhood schools are not set in stone. They remain viable as long as they serve public policy; to the extent that they protect and prolong racial segregation, they are anathema to public policy. As the Court has further emphasized, home rule and neighborhood schools impose no obstacle to and do not dilute or diminish the Commissioner’s exercise of her obligation to fight segregation in public schools.”

Then late last year New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin pushed for the case to be resolved in mediation, rather than by a judge. The two sides have now been negotiating over a settlement for more than a year, blowing past deadlines to reach a settlement while saying that there has been good progress in the talks.

In the survey, voters were presented with three possible options for increasing racial integration in New Jersey schools. Of these, the creation of regional magnet schools was the most popular, with 60 percent of voters saying that they would find it acceptable. (Note: NJ’s regional magnets are among the most racially and socio-economically segregated schools in the state.) Fifty-two percent of voters say that they would be OK with the mergers of adjacent school systems, and only 35 percent say that transfer systems requiring schools to accept transfers from more diverse school districts would be acceptable through Interdistrict School Choice, although very few seats are available due to state funding rules.

While support for regional magnet schools is high across the political spectrum, Republicans and conservatives in the state are much less likely to say that school district mergers or transfer systems would be acceptable ways to reduce segregation. Sixty-two percent of Democrats and 61 percent of liberals say that they would be fine with merging school districts, but only 42 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of conservatives in the state agree. This gap in party is partly driven by differences in how Black and Hispanic voters view the proposals: Black (65 percent) and Hispanic voters (64 percent) are much more likely to support school district mergers than white voters (47 percent) are. Similarly, only 31 percent of white voters say that they would support mandatory transfer systems, compared with 53 percent of Black voters.

“Regional magnet schools are the most popular solution because they don’t do anything to disrupt the existing school systems,” said Cassino. “But it’s also not clear how much they would do to solve the deep underlying problem facing the state.”

Potential mergers of school districts also face a hurdle from how New Jersey voters view their own districts, relative to the surrounding school systems. Thirty-eight percent of voters say that their school district is better than the neighboring districts, while only 12 percent say that their school district is worse.

“If you think your schools are worse than the schools next door, a merger might seem like a good thing,” said Cassino. “But people are much more likely to think that their schools are better, so a merger would mean trading down.”