A new Rutgers University report
titled, “New Jersey’s Dysfunctional State Education System,” is
comparing New Jersey’s public schools to the system of apartheid.
Apartheid was a racial segregated system that was once enforced by legislators
in South Africa.
The report argues that 26 percent of
Black and 13 percent of Latino New Jersey students attend schools where 1
percent or fewer of the students are White. Blacks in New Jersey public
schools face “more extreme segregation than Blacks in the South,” where
segregation was once the law.
Attorney Paul Tractenberg, who is a
professor at the Rutgers Institute on Education Law and Policy, and
one of the authors of the report, told NorthJersey.comthat he used
the word “apartheid” to grab attention.
Tractenberg stated, “I was frankly
blindsided once I started focusing on the categories of ‘intensely segregated’
and ‘apartheid’ schools. I find it extremely depressing that New Jersey has
what I believe is the strongest state constitution requiring racial balance in
the schools, and we have done pretty much zero with that.”
Although New Jersey is considered a
wealthy state, and considers itself a state that has a strong racial balance in
its public schools, the study points out that there is “double segregation” of
race and poverty. It is noted that 79 percent of New Jersey’s Black
students are impoverished and come from disenfranchised neighborhoods, mostly
condensed in the Passaic County area.
James Harris, president of the NJ
State Conference of the NAACP toldNorthJersey.com, “what’s
missing in New Jersey is the will to fix the problem of segregation.”
Tractenberg agreed. He felt
that by writing off Black and Latino, the state of New Jersey will be doing a
disservice to all races in the state of New Jersey, and that integration would
actually help White students. He told NorthJersey.com, “White
kids growing up in isolation aren’t being prepared for the kind of world they
will enter” as adults, he further said. “There are kids growing up in White
suburban New Jersey who have virtually no contact with anybody with a different
skin color.”
North Jersey.com states that “children learn more in schools with
better-prepared classmates, strong teachers and stability. Schools with
concentrated poverty tend to have high turnover among students and faculty,
less experienced teachers and a more limited curriculum, often taught at lower
levels because of students’ weak preparation.”
The Rutgers study
argued for a range of steps that will get the government to integrate New
Jersey schools and also enact policies that will allow students to transfer to
public schools outside of their districts.
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