New Jersey's Segregated Schools
The Brian Lehrer Show
WNYC
4.6 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2023
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John Mooney, founding editor of NJ Spotlight News, talks about the launch of a cross-newsroom collaboration examining the lack of racial and economic diversity in New Jersey's public schools, despite the diversity in the population as a whole. And Javier Robles, vice president of the Latino Action Network of New Jersey (LAN) and Rutgers professor in the Kinesiology and Health department, discusses the soon-to-be-decided lawsuit brought by LAN and NAACP and others in 2018 over the lack of diversity in New Jersey's schools.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's the Brian Lairishow on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. A 2017 study from the Civil |
| 0:16.9 | Rights Project at UCLA ranked New Jersey the sixth most segregated state for black students |
| 0:23.6 | and seventh for Latino students in the nation. A ruling in a lawsuit filed in 2018 over |
| 0:30.7 | that lack of diversity in the state's public schools as do soon and that's prompted over |
| 0:35.3 | 12 newsrooms covering New Jersey to collaborate and publish stories this week on how we got |
| 0:41.4 | here and what the ruling could mean for students going forward. WNYC and Gothamist are among |
| 0:46.8 | the news organizations participating but to open our conversation about this we're joined |
| 0:51.8 | now by John Mooney the founding editor of NJ Spotlight News where this coverage is kicking |
| 0:57.0 | off and by Javier Robles the new president of the Latino Action Network of New Jersey who |
| 1:03.2 | along with the NAACP and other organizations filed a suit. So John Mooney welcome back Javier |
| 1:09.8 | Robles welcome to WNYC. Hi Brian nice to be back. Javier statistics cited in the lawsuit |
| 1:16.4 | include that almost 25% of black students attend schools that are 99% non-white and 67% |
| 1:25.6 | of black students attend a school that is at least 75% non-white. For Latino students the |
| 1:32.2 | numbers are slightly lower with 62% of students attending schools that are at least 75% non-white. |
| 1:40.6 | So that's a lot of numbers to throw at people but what do those statistics add up to in |
| 1:45.4 | your view? I guess in the view of the Latino Action Network and a lot of our colleagues who |
| 1:51.3 | are on this lawsuit it really means that New Jersey schools are still segregated and still offering |
| 1:59.5 | students that are in the segregated districts educational experience that is not the same |
| 2:08.4 | offer to other students in non-segregated districts. And John Mooney Spotlight has a story I see |
| 2:14.4 | with several charts and interactive maps so people can see the data overall and by school how can |
| 2:20.9 | people use the map? Yeah there's a couple ways we have a lot of data there and it's hard to |
| 2:32.0 | wrap your head around it but what is available is in each of the data sets that we have you're |
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