Dr. Zoë Burkholder Comments on NJ’s Segregation History in Schools for NorthJersey.com

Dr. Zoë Burkholder, Professor in the Educational Foundation Department, recently spoke with NorthJersey.com regarding segregation history in New Jersey schools.

A much-awaited ruling on a school segregation lawsuit could have historic consequences for New Jersey’s public schools and add more than a wrinkle to a school year that is already politically and culturally polarized.

New Jersey’s public schools are intensely segregated racially and economically, alleges a lawsuit filed in 2018 in state Superior Court in Mercer County against the state by the Latino Action Network, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other organizations.

Dr. Burkholder commented on the history of the topic in our state.

In the 1940s and through the early ’50s, school officials also unofficially contributed to segregation by redrawing neighborhood lines to exclude Black residents, even adjusting them when Black families moved in, according to Dr. Burkholder.

Residential segregation was “incredibly powerful,” she said, but even in racially diverse towns like Montclair, “there was still gerrymandering of school assignment lines.”

School officials “would take out their maps every year and start drawing circles around which neighborhoods would be assigned to which schools, and that would give school officials a great deal of freedom … Sometimes when they modified those catchment zones, they could cross the street and circle one Black family’s house. They could literally free-draw neighborhood catchment zones,” said Dr. Burkholder, who lives in Montclair, where her children attend public schools.