A just-released report from New America’s Education Funding Equity Initiative measures how school district boundaries create deep “economic and social divisions” and “radically different educational resources and experiences for students,” even in districts that abut one another. While 53% of America’s K-12 students are of color, 46% of those students are enrolled in just one percent of all U.S. school districts. Twenty-six percent of school districts enroll a student body that is 90% white.

The analysts examined at “24,658 pairs of adjacent districts,” looking at poverty rates between the two identified districts and differences in race. Then they chose the 100 most segregating school district boundaries.

The most segregated school district boundary is right here:  East Orange City School District, where the median income is $54,520 and only three miles away from Glen Ridge Borough School District, where the income level is almost four and a half times as high, at $243,899.

 Other adjacent districts in the Garden State that make the top 100 list (measured on three different axes, which is why Red Bank fills three slots) are Camden City School District and Haddon Township School District; Seaside Heights Borough and Berkeley Township; Atlantic City School District and Egg Harbor; Woodbine Borough School District and Upper Township School District; Red Bank and Little Silver; Red Bank and Fair Haven; Red Bank and Shrewsbury; Roselle Borough and Cranford; Lawnside Borough and Barrington Borough

This is why New Jersey has the sixth most segregated state school system in the country. 

We do have this in our favor: while some states still rely heavily on local property taxes for local school costs, New Jersey has a progressive school funding formula, courtesy of the Education Law Center, that successfully argued the state must compensate school districts with low ratables. That’s why Newark’s state aid for 2024-2025 will be $1.25 billion. Yet we’re still left with this: when we redline school districts through housing costs, “children are segregated from their peers, deprived of the opportunity to learn alongside students of different backgrounds.”

Currently there is a lawsuit pressed by the Latino Action Network that charges that NJ’s segregation of Black and Latino students and assignments to schools based on respective municipalities is “unlawful” and the State Legislature must adopt a “replacement assignment methodology.” The Murphy Administration has argued against the lawsuit, most likely because school district consolidation  is political poison in a state addicted to local control. Meanwhile, if you can afford the mortgage in Glen Ridge, your child has a 76% chance of reading on grade level and a 71% chance of math proficiency. If your economic circumstances force you a five-minute drive away to East Orange, you child’s odds go down to 31% in reading and 13% in math.

What should we do? According to New America, “purposefully draw school district boundaries to include heterogeneous student communities and more economically mixed areas.”