Attorneys representing a group of New Jersey parents and activist groups are asking a state appellate court to weigh in on a case that could reshape the state鈥檚 public education system.

At the center of the fight is whether New Jersey schools are unconstitutionally segregated by race and socioeconomic status. A lower court judge in October 2023 acknowledged the state鈥檚 public schools are segregated by race and that the state must act, but also found that the plaintiffs had failed to prove the entire system is segregated across all its districts.

The parents鈥� attorneys asking it to hear the case.

鈥淚t is imperative that no more students be deprived of these rights by the trial court鈥檚 avoidance of the straightforward conclusion compelled by the facts and the law in this case 鈥� that the state defendants, who are legally obligated to take action to desegregate public schools regardless of the reasons for that segregation, have acted unconstitutionally by failing to do so,鈥� the attorneys wrote in the filing.

Gov. Phil Murphy and the state Department of Education have until April 28 to respond to the plaintiffs鈥� new filing. A spokesman for the Murphy administration declined to comment.

News of the new filing was .

The case dates to 2018, when the Latino Action Network, the NAACP New Jersey State Conference, and several other families and groups聽聽alleging New Jersey failed to address de facto segregation in public schools. The plaintiffs聽聽attend schools that are more than 90% non-white, in districts that are often just blocks from predominantly white districts.

In New Jersey, students typically attend schools in the municipality where they live. Plaintiffs argued that long-standing housing policies that led to segregated residential neighborhoods led to segregated schools also. New Jersey is the seventh-most segregated state for Black and Latino students, the plaintiffs say.

聽after Superior Court Judge Robert Lougy issued his ruling that acknowledged racial segregation in New Jersey schools but said it was not widespread, both sides entered mediation talks in hopes it would resolve more quickly than continued litigation.

Attorneys for the parties said聽 that it鈥檚 unlikely continuing the talks would 鈥渂e constructive.鈥�

The plaintiffs鈥� attorneys say the lower court鈥檚 October ruling should be reversed. They want a judge to review what they say are six errors in the 2023 order, like the fact that Lougy did not identify a disputed fact.

鈥淩ather than reach the only logical conclusion that followed 鈥� that the state defendants violated plaintiffs鈥� constitutional rights 鈥� the trial court left the question of liability for another day,鈥� the filing reads.

If the appellate court denies the motion, the case would return to the trial court, or could be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com.

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In most places in the country, enrolling in high school is a simple matter: You graduate middle school and move on to your local high school.

That鈥檚 not .

In the nation鈥檚 largest school system, 12- and 13-year-olds go through a process that many say is as stressful 鈥� or more so 鈥� than applying to college. Students must rank preferences from a list of more than 400 schools citywide with widely varying specialties and admissions requirements, including essays, auditions, and interviews. Then, they wait months for an algorithm to spit out a match.

Many of those features are a result of big reforms that came two decades ago with the intention of making the system more fair and efficient. Twenty years later, some of those changes have paid off, but segregation and inequality remain baked into the system, a recent convening found.

The Nov. 18 conference, organized by Fordham Law School鈥檚 Feerick Center for Social Justice and the nonprofit New York Appleseed, which advocates for school integration, brought together policymakers, academics, admissions professionals, parents, and students to reflect on how the city鈥檚 current admissions system came to be and how it鈥檚 working.

Measuring how the reforms of two decades ago have worked is complicated and depends on how you define success, panelists said.

As a 鈥渢echnical solution, these reforms were very successful,鈥� said Sean Corcoran, associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University who has studied city high school admissions for decades. Far fewer students ended up without a match and were assigned to a school they didn鈥檛 choose than before the reforms, Corcoran said, and the changes made it far more difficult for schools and families to game the system.

But as the number of high school options exploded and information became more accessible through the internet, the system has become more and more complex for families, posing equity concerns in a city where the time, resources, and savvy to navigate all that information aren鈥檛 evenly distributed.

And despite efforts over the years to make the system more fair, it remains

Here are some of the big takeaways and lingering questions from the convening.

Reforms were a bid to bring order to an unwieldy system

Most immediately, the reforms introduced by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools Chancellor Joel Klein were an effort to rationalize a system officials said was rife with inequity and inefficiency.

Before the reforms, students had the option of attending a zoned school but could also apply to up to five options across the city. Students could get into multiple schools or none at all. Some 30,000 students a year didn鈥檛 get into any of their choices and were assigned a school by the city, according to

There were also more ways for schools and families to game the system, experts said. Principals could withhold a portion of their seats until late in the process, giving them more discretion over whom to admit.

By requiring all students to participate in the choice system and running their rankings through an algorithm that spit out a single match per applicant, officials tried to maximize the number of students getting into a school of their choice. The number of unmatched students dropped from 30,000 to 3,000.

Under the old system, families could win an advantage at some schools by ranking them first, incentivizing families to be strategic with their rankings. Under the current system, ranking a school lower down on their list no longer puts students at an admissions disadvantage.

Last year, 77% of eighth graders citywide got into one of their top three choices, according to Education Department data.

鈥淭hat is an important criteria, but by itself is not a sufficient measure of success,鈥� said Corcoran.

The promise and perils of more information

Many of the tweaks Education Department officials have made over the years were efforts to make information more accessible to more families, from creating a new online application and school search tool, to compiling school open house dates in a central calendar, to introducing a .

鈥淲e still have a very complex system we鈥檙e operating in,鈥� said Lianna Wright, the executive director of Enrollment Research and Policy at the Education Department鈥檚 Office of Student Enrollment. But 鈥渨e鈥檝e made a lot of changes to the process to make it more transparent and to try to advance equity.鈥�

And there鈥檚 some evidence that increasing access to better information about schools for disadvantaged families can make a difference. A research team led by Corcoran found that offering middle school students simple tools to help them compare the quality of high schools in their neighborhoods helped them attend schools with higher graduation rates.

But there are also dangers to continuing to flood families with more information and relying on that approach to increase equity, some panelists warned.

鈥溾�嬧�婭t seems like there鈥檚 more and more information 鈥� and that is good for transparency, but it may actually increase racial and class disparities in admissions,鈥� said Christopher Bonastia, a professor of sociology at Lehman College who has .

Selective admissions continue to be a defining and dividing feature

It鈥檚 impossible to understand the city鈥檚 high school admissions system without grappling with the prevalence of screened schools that select students based on prior academic performance, essays, audition, neighborhood of residence, and more.

Debates over the effects of screening stretch back decades before the 2004 admissions reforms. State legislators enshrined the test that determines entry to the city鈥檚 specialized high schools in 1971. A 1986 New York Times letter to the editor from future Mayor David Dinkins lamented the growth of selective 鈥渢heme鈥� schools that created 鈥渢wo school systems, one rich and one poor, one a success and the other a failure.鈥�

But the landscape of screened high schools has changed dramatically over the past two decades as the city shuttered dozens of large high schools and opened hundreds of new ones. Manhattan gained roughly 1,000 screened seats since 2004 while the Bronx lost more than 2,000, according to an analysis from Jen Jennings, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. The city鈥檚 most selective schools far out of step with the demographics of the school system, despite tweaks over the years to screened admissions and the growth of programs that give underrepresented students priority.

City officials and supporters of the screened schools argue they鈥檙e immensely popular, ensure high achievers are challenged academically, and keep families who might otherwise leave in the system.

But the existence of those schools also concentrates more low-achieving and disadvantaged students in unscreened schools, and students at those schools are 鈥渁cutely aware of the status of their school,鈥� said Bonastia, the Lehman College professor.

鈥淚t made for a really sad experience to watch all my friends go to these 鈥榞ood鈥� high schools, and where I went it wasn鈥檛 really looked at as a great high school,鈥� said Katelyn Melville, a senior at the Brooklyn Institute for Liberal Arts, an unscreened school in Flatbush. 鈥淚t made me feel really less than.鈥�

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Casey Stockstill, Dartmouth College sociologist and author of , and Halley Potter, senior fellow and director of PK-12 education policy at the Century Foundation, want to change that. They鈥檝e joined forces to identify successful economically integrated early education programs and document what they look like and how they make it work. I was excited to hear about their work. In my reporting, I too have explored those , including a my kids attended. So, I reached out to Stockstill and Potter to learn more about their work. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Kendra Hurley: Why do you think segregation in early education remains so under the radar compared to K-12, and what do we lose when we don’t speak about it, or address it?

Halley Potter: Part of the challenge of talking about segregation in early education is that we haven’t fixed the question of access yet. For all of the challenges in our public schools, at least we have a guaranteed right to an education for students once they start kindergarten. But in early ed, because we still need to make sure more children have access to quality early learning, that’s where most of the conversation stays. But we do need to be having the conversation about segregation as we’re having the conversation about access. If we don’t, then we can end up expanding access on the backbone of our highly inequitable and segregated system.

And that鈥檚 a big missed opportunity, because in many ways, early learning environments are best set up to take advantage of a lot of the benefits of diverse educational settings. High quality early learning is play-based 鈥� it鈥檚 about children interacting with each other鈥� so there’s this great opportunity to have children coming in with different experiences and different vocabularies, creating a really rich learning environment.

Also, parents are talking to teachers more, and [it鈥檚] kind of the whole family coming in to the learning environment, so a diverse community in a classroom can lead to benefits for families as well. You [might] have social connections between a parent who’s looking for a job and a parent who’s looking to hire someone, or knows about a job opening.

There’s evidence that parents are the most receptive and excited about diverse learning environments, during children鈥檚 early years. I think of that, and I think, 鈥淟et’s capitalize on that.鈥� Getting kids in early education programs when they鈥檙e young could help families see the value in that early on, and that might influence their education choices and the ways that they show up in different educational spaces as their kids get older, too.

Casey Stockstill: For many parents, child care is their introduction to school.听So, it鈥檚 what聽they get used to in terms of their child’s classmates, and how to engage with the teacher, and what to expect.

Also, teaching kids can look really different when you have segregated classrooms. In my book, I observe a Head Start classroom where you have six kids experiencing issues at home because of poverty, or they’re new to preschool because their family moves all the time because of poverty.

Teachers are dealing with those issues, and that can take away time from things like sitting down and reading a book calmly with a child. We add a list of demands to teachers when we give them a classroom of students who are all in poverty. And when you think about majority white preschools, where there’s one or two kids of color with a white teacher, sometimes that doesn’t communicate that it’s welcoming to kids of color. So, I wonder how segregation is making it harder for preschools to do this work of closing equity gaps. I don’t think separate is equal here either.

Hurley: There are so many barriers to integration in early education, parent choice being one of them. How did you choose to focus on programs that are tackling it with funding solutions?

Potter: We have this fractured early education system. We have private programs that charge tuition that is typically unaffordable to lower income families. And then we have many public programs like Head Start which are only open to low-income families, or to children who have met certain other criteria for risk factors. So, we’re set up for segregation.

The real solution is big public investments in early education that make it possible for everyone to access this together. But until we get there, we have to work with the fractured, flawed system we have, and one of the ways to do that is to create more programs that are accepting multiple types of funding streams. And then we can have multiple types of families enrolled.

Stockstill: Bringing different funding streams together (called blending and braiding funding) is the first step to increased accessibility for Black, Latino and Indigenous families. That鈥檚 because we have racial gaps in income and wealth. So, if you have a private program that is expensive and inaccessible to middle-income or lower-income families, that program is going to shut out a disproportionate share of Black, Latino and Indigenous families. There’s a hope that programs that do the blending and braiding will also consider racial equity and inclusion, and make their programs welcoming to children and families of color.

Hurley: Tell me about the project you鈥檙e working on to that end.

Potter: We鈥檙e building a list of early childhood programs that are doing different types of blending and braiding of funding, and are using that as a way to enroll children from diverse backgrounds, diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, but also diverse racial backgrounds, and in some cases linguistic diversity and diversity of ability. And part of that will be in-depth profiles of some programs. We鈥檙e hoping that showing examples of where a funding strategy has been leveraged to create diversity will help increase the appetite to do that, answer some questions about strategies that work, and also serve as an advocacy tool.

In most cases, blending and braiding really feels like pushing against the tide. If you are a Head Start provider and you want to enroll families who pay tuition, there aren’t a lot of supports to make that happen. If you’re at a private preschool and you’re interested in taking children with child care subsidies, again, it’s usually up to you to figure it out.

Stockstill: I hear quite a bit from directors who say, 鈥淲e accept the subsidy, but we don’t have any families using it.鈥� And if a family goes through an income loss or can’t make a payment, there are programs that want to be able to continue supporting them. And what I tell them is, 鈥淗aving a [mixed] funding structure is the answer.鈥� So, there’s this appetite for inclusion, but there are these missing links.

And there are parents who would like a diverse early learning environment. You just usually can’t find one, because we know two-thirds of these programs are segregated. I see it as being helpful to certain programs to offer an integrated program, and to kind of sell that as a plus to affluent parents who basically have more choice.

Hurley: What about the big chain child care programs like Kindercare, Bright Horizons and Primrose? Few of their centers take subsidies or vouchers and their tuition is often quite high, making them inaccessible to many families. Yet they鈥檙e capturing a bigger and bigger share of the child care market. Are you planning to look at what they might do to diversity their funding and families?

Stockstill: This category of child care that are chains that do franchising charge the highest tuition, and they do not pay teachers more. For them, it鈥檚 profit-seeking. And the administrative cost of blending and braiding funding streams, and also accepting the subsidy rate does not lend well to profit.

There’s always a gap between the subsidy rate 鈥� which is what the government offers you to provide care to a kid on the subsidy program 鈥� and what programs actually need to serve that kid well. And a lot of the successfully diverse programs like or All Five in Menlo Park, California, make up that difference, through fundraising, or they’ll charge affluent families even more and let them subsidize the diversity. But all of that takes a commitment and an administrative savviness that I don’t see the chains being interested in.

Hurley: Casey, you鈥檙e working on program profiles for this project. What have you seen on visits to diverse child care programs that makes you hopeful?聽聽

Stockstill: My favorite thing is hearing the stories of continuity of learning and care for the children. The Auraria Early Learning Center at the Auraria Higher Education Center in Colorado, serves student parents who are eligible for Head Start alongside faculty who pay full tuition. When the students graduate, they suddenly earn a higher income.

So they鈥檙e now past eligibility requirements for Head Start, but they can’t afford the $1,200 a month for care. If a family went to a pure Head Start program, they would have to move centers because they鈥檙e no longer eligible for Head Start. But because the program has mixed funding, their children can stay as they increase their income or the reverse, like if someone loses the job. It’s like, 鈥測ou still get to be in this school; you still deserve to come here; it’s not about how much money your family makes.鈥� I love that.

Are you a teacher or parent in a diverse child care program? Reach out to Halley Potter and Casey Stockstill by writing to potter@tcf.org.听