Prometheus 6   

By Yvonne Abraham and Francie Latour, Globe Staff, 9/2/2003

Almost three decades after Boston's bruising school desegregation battles, nearly half of the white children in the city attend private schools and most minority children remain walled off from suburban school advantages, according to a report released yesterday.

The report, by the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at the State University of New York at Albany, depicts a region with stark divisions between school districts. Students in Boston public schools are mostly black and Hispanic. Hispanic children are concentrated in schools in the blue-collar, satellite cities such as Lowell and Lawrence. And suburban schools are predominantly white.

"White children have almost entirely escaped the city of Boston, and those who remain in the city live in increasingly advantaged city neighborhoods; half of them attend private schools," it reads. "The vast majority of them live in the suburbs, and in the suburbs they grow up in neighborhoods and attend schools that are typically 90 percent white and remarkably affluent."

The report, sponsored by The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, is part of a yearlong effort called the Metro Boston Equity Initiative, a study of segregation and inequality in the region. Researchers unveiled the findings as part of a weekend-long Harvard conference on race relations.

…According to the study, the white flight that followed busing in the 1970s continued through the 1990s. In 1990, 36.7 percent of Boston's children were white, but only 23.5 percent of the students enrolled in the public elementary schools were white. In 2000, 25.4 percent of the city's children were white, and they made up only 13.6 percent of Boston elementary school enrollments.

The white children who remain in Boston -- 30,000, or 3.2 percent of the entire region's population of white children -- live in neighborhoods where 85 percent of the children are white. Fully 44 percent of white children in Boston attend private schools.

By contrast, 46.8 percent of the region's black children live in Boston, and 22.5 percent of Hispanic children call the city home.

The picture in the suburbs is equally lopsided: 80 percent of the white under-18 population lives in the suburbs; only 21.4 percent of blacks in that age group and 24.1 percent of Hispanic youths and children live in the suburbs. Nationwide, by comparison, 40 percent of the black and Hispanic under-18 population lives in the suburbs, according to the report. The reasons for that are not just economic, said John R. Logan, an author of the study and director of the Mumford Center. Even when minority families become affluent, they tend to stay in neighborhoods with lower incomes and education levels, he said.

"Income is not the primary driver of the system here," he said. "There is very good evidence of discrimination in the housing market, and there is the historic legacy of a color line people hesitate to cross. It's asking a lot of a black family to be the only black family in a community."[p6: people who substitute EA (economic assistance) for Aa should take note]

But Mayor Thomas M. Menino took umbrage at the report: Seeing the Boston schools through a demographic lens does them an injustice, he said. The study says nothing about the quality of Boston's schools, which has improved enormously in recent years, he said.

"We can't continue to talk about black and white," he said. "Let's talk about achievement. The answer is to have quality schools, and when you have quality schools, there's no color. All parents want quality schools and that's what we have today in Boston."

Logan said it is not the racial disparities between school districts that allow for educational inequities but the economic differences that attend them.[p6: uh huh. and it is, of course, a coincidence that the economic differences attend the same groups that experience educational inequities]