As the chair of a committee that advises the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on matters of race and equity in public education, Raul Fernandez (COM’00, Wheelock’16) is practicing what he teaches. Photo by Chris McIntosh for Boston University Photography

Education

Wheelock Lecturer Works inside and outside the System to Fight for Education Equality

70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, a new report shows school segregation is on the rise in Massachusetts. Alum Raul Fernandez is doing something about it.

Racial segregation in America’s public schools feels like something that happened back then. Back then, Black children were segregated by race into unsafe school buildings—in poorly resourced classrooms with too few desks and secondhand textbooks—that were often inaccessible by public transportation. 

Following the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ruling racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, states and districts began the long and sometimes messy process of integrating schools. Seven decades after that consequential decision, segregated schools are a thing of the past, a societal sin rightfully put on the trash heap of history. Right?

Not so, says Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development lecturer Raul Fernandez, who researches school segregation and taught a new course on the subject this spring. Fernandez chairs a committee for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) that has been studying the issue in the Bay State. 

In a 45-page report published June 4, the committee, the Racial Imbalance Advisory Council (RIAC), mined publicly available data for evidence of racial segregation in Massachusetts public school districts. They found “persistent racial segregation” across the commonwealth resulting in “clear and heartbreaking differences between the educational outcomes of students in schools overwhelmingly populated by students of color compared with those overwhelmingly populated by white students,” says Fernandez (COM’00, Wheelock’16). 

Notably, the report found a chasm between the success of “intensely segregated white schools” and “intensely segregated non-white schools.” Under DESE’s assessment of educational outcomes, largely white schools had an average score of 66.32 percent student achievement, while largely non-white schools averaged 18.72 percent—a 48-point gap. Nationally, the share of public schools with student bodies that are more than 90 percent white has risen from around 7 percent in 1988 to nearly 20 percent in 2024.

Racial imbalance manifests in two main ways, according to Fernandez. The first is when the majority of students in a school or district are of one race, which he says inherently deprives students of a diversity of experiences and viewpoints.

“Think about the US senator who went to all-white schools K-12 and likely a historically or predominantly white institution for college and is now tasked with writing and voting on laws that have implications for communities of color, of which that senator has little firsthand knowledge,” Fernandez says.

“The second is an even more pernicious form of racial imbalance or segregation, where the student outcomes correlate heavily with race and income,” he continues. “As our analysis of DESE data shows, this form of ‘double segregation’ correlates with large gaps in test scores, chronic absenteeism, graduation rates, college matriculation, and more.” 

Allowed to Grow and Thrive

Fernandez gained firsthand knowledge of our two-tiered system of education while growing up with his family in the Spanish Harlem section of New York City in the 1980s, nearly 30 years after Brown. When he was just four years old, a preschool teacher recommended him for a gifted and talented program in the city’s public schools. 

The importance of that moment, Fernandez says, cannot be overstated: “[The program] lifts me out of what would have been my neighborhood schools all the way through high school and puts me on a different track, in a different place, with exceptional teachers, well-resourced schools, access to any number of extracurriculars, and the kind of environment where the soil is fertile and well-watered, the sun is shining, and where kids are allowed to grow and thrive.”

Fernandez thrived in the gifted track, developing—at school and at home—a love for learning. The program was an advantage, a golden ticket of sorts, that allowed him to excel in one of the city’s prestigious high schools, the Bronx High School of Science, and eventually at Boston University as an undergraduate and graduate student. He’s both grateful for an opportunity that transformed his life and fully aware that he benefited from an education system that seems to randomly offer some students a chance for success, while leaving others behind. 

Case in point: When Fernandez attended the Bronx High School of Science, 9 out of 10 students earned a diploma. The high school where many of his neighborhood friends attended, Bronx’s Robert Louis Stevenson High School—which was closed in 2009 for poor performance—graduated just 3 in 10 students. He remembers wondering, years later, why he was picked for a superior education and his friends were not.

“Those are the kids I grew up with in my neighborhood,” Fernandez says. “I was very much like them in all other ways, except for the educational opportunities that were made available to me.”

A Two-Tiered System

In the Brown decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregating public schools based on race is unconstitutional, even if segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. In a separate ruling a year later, the high court ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” but it did not spell out how to do so. The result was outright resistance in parts of the southern United States and poorly implemented desegregation efforts elsewhere. 

Notably, the Massachusetts legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act in 1965, ordering the state’s public schools to desegregate. But it would take nearly two decades for the city of Boston to make noticeable progress in desegregating its schools—and not without a federal court order and a sloppily rolled-out plan that involved Black and white kids being bused to schools far from their homes. The program resulted in daily protests and violence. Meanwhile, white parents pulled their kids out of Boston schools en masse, nearly cutting in half student enrollment during the busing years.

Decades later, Fernandez, curious about the education journey of BU undergraduates, conducted an informal poll among members of a Latinx student group and found that all but a handful of the 50 or so participants had attended well-resourced, largely white high schools. Fernandez wanted to know why this was, so he embarked on a deep dive at Wheelock into the presence of racial imbalance and segregation in public schools today. He found that decades after Brown, many K-12 school districts remain racially segregated, with Black and brown students often concentrated in under-resourced and underperforming schools. Meanwhile, white students have, on average, the least access to racially diverse peers. 

In spring 2024, Fernandez parlayed his research into School Segregation (SEDAP 654), a Wheelock course that explores what he calls “one of the most intractable issues in education.” The course surveys the history and current state of school segregation, with case studies coming from Boston and New York City. “I got great feedback from the initial group and am excited to teach the course as part of the BPS Dr. Carol Johnson District Leadership Fellowship this fall, and again for BU students in spring 2025,” Fernandez says. “Creating this course is without question the thing I’m most proud of during my time on faculty at BU.”

Fernandez’s exploration of school segregation has led to a position advising state education leaders on matters of race and equity. Under his leadership, RIAC—which formed in response to desegregation efforts in the 1970s—focuses on curbing racial imbalance and segregation in schools. 

For their new report on school segregation, Fernandez says, the committee originally set out to capture statistical trends relating to the racial makeup of the state’s schools, but lacked time and support from DESE’s data team. Their reporting largely relied on existing datasets kept by DESE, but several outside reports helped them better understand racial segregation in Massachusetts. 

RIAC’s June report found that more than 225,000 Massachusetts students—90 percent of them Latino or Black—languish at substandard, segregated schools. Segregated non-white schools have higher levels of suspensions and chronic absenteeism, and lower graduation rates and test scores. 

Many of the committee’s recommended actions involve better oversight and compliance from DESE and its Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, which Fernandez says has allowed segregation to fester in Massachusetts schools for too long. Recommendations include DESE coming into compliance with existing laws around racial imbalance, working with the legislature to review and update outdated laws, and collecting more data on segregation and making it publicly accessible. RIAC also calls on the legislature to unlock “substantial funding” in the budget for integration efforts in Massachusetts schools. Other recommendations include requiring school districts to conduct racial imbalance analyses prior to closing, building, or relocating a school and allowing students attending racially imbalanced or isolated schools to transfer to another school in the district. 

Fernandez is hopeful that the report will ultimately lead to less segregated schools in Massachusetts. The path to those changes, however, could get bumpy, he says.

“This is the first report in a generation on school segregation in Massachusetts, and I think there’s going to be a lot of interest in it,” Fernandez says. “Frankly, based on the data that we’ve already seen, potentially lawsuits will come out of it. In New Jersey and Minnesota, there have been cases recently where the courts have found [these states and their districts allowing] unconstitutional segregation. I think that’s going to be some of the outcome of the work of RIAC, or the state will figure out how to intervene before this happens.”