Fifty years after the state began using busing to integrate schools, segregation is still a problem in Massachusetts. That’s according to a report released last week by the state’s Racial Imbalance Advisory Council.
The report found that roughly two-thirds of publicly funded schools in Massachusetts are segregated.
On the Cape and Islands, a little more than half of publicly funded schools are segregated.
According to the report, majority non-white segregated schools tend to perform worse than other schools. Performance outcomes are measured by factors like graduation rates, standardized test results, and school suspension rates.
“The outcomes of those intensely segregated non-white schools are substantially worse than the outcome of racially diverse schools and whiter schools,” said Raul Fernandez, the chair of the council that did the report.
This phenomenon disproportionately impacts Black and Latino students, Fernandez said.
The Cape only has two segregated non-white schools, and both are in Barnstable. Barnstable school committee member Andre King said this is not so much a result of segregation, as it is a reflection of the area population.
"Up to half of the students who attend Barnstable Public Schools are minorities,” King said. “We have, in our district, great diversity, which we’re proud to say is a part of our strength."
Except for those two schools, all other schools in the Barnstable district were found to be racially diverse. So were all the public schools in Mashpee, the Dennis-Yarmouth district, and on Nantucket.
Meanwhile, half of schools on the Cape and Islands are segregated, majority-white schools.
In districts like Bourne, Falmouth, and Sandwich, every single school in the district is majority-white segregated.
Segregated white schools tend to have better outcomes for students, the report found.
But Fernandez says students at segregated, majority-white schools are missing out on diverse perspectives.
“We have students that live in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, go to overwhelmingly white schools, and then go into the world, whatever field they go into, making decisions that impact communities of color, without having had many engagements, personal experience, close bonds with people of color,” Fernandez said. “We say, that matters too.”
The report has two additional categories that do not appear on the Cape and Islands: intensely segregated white, and intensely segregated nonwhite. These intensely segregated schools make up 16 percent of the schools in the state. Intensely segregated schools have student bodies that are either 90 to 100 percent white or 90 to 100 percent nonwhite.
The report includes 18 recommendations for how the state and individual districts can usher along integration.
