John R. Logan, Deirdre Oakley and Jacob Stowell, Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, Harvard University
September 1, 2003
This short, uninspired, and wholly predictable paper presents a variety of data on the demographics of Boston and its surrounding suburbs, all of which show that Boston is segregated: blacks live in the city and whites live in the suburbs. As a result, Boston-area public schools are segregated and (the paper presumes) are much worse in the city than in the suburbs. Of course, Boston mirrors many other metropolitan areas in this respect, though its segregation is sharper than most. This is a familiar problem and one with no easy solutions (as the tragic history of Boston busing and backlash readily attests). However, the complexity of the issue is no excuse for this paper's embarrassingly weak "conclusions and policy implications," which simply restate the problem and suggest that "the only way that desegregation plans could substantially reduce the separate and unequal character of public education is if they were applied region-wide." This has long been the single note sung by the Harvard Civil Rights Project but it starts and ends with the false premise that state-controlled desegregation plans are the solution. A better idea is to make district boundaries permeable and allow families to choose among all public schools. Minnesota tried this and found that, in the worst districts, housing prices rose (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=14#298); in other words, choice helps decrease the economic disparities that contribute to segregation in the first place. More importantly, it would give minority students the same option to "escape the City of Boston" that this paper says whites have already exercised. To read for yourself, see http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/news/pressreleases.php/record_id=37/.
