Almost half a century after the start of desegregation in the Boston Public Schools, City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune could point to a model of inclusive learning in Mattapan, at the Mattahunt Elementary School. With its pioneering dual language program in Haitian Creole and English, it was her choice for referring students newly arrived from Haiti.

“I’m always trying to refer a new arrival to see if they can [be enrolled], and there just aren’t enough seats,” said Louijeune, a BPS graduate and daughter of Haitian immigrants.

Her exchange with BPS officials, at an April 29 City Council Ways and Means Committee budget hearing, signaled progress for the school system, but also one more struggle over policy and resources. After decades of demographic change, followed by a recent surge in new immigrants coming to Boston, the debate over equity in the BPS had shifted, with more focus on multilingual learners and students with disabilities, who were also disproportionately people of color. But, for some parents and leaders, the debate had also shifted beyond the BPS and city limits – even beyond education.

The debate also takes place when the struggle over desegregation, starting at least as far back as the 1960s, is more distant and less familiar. According to a recent survey of BPS parents by the MassINC Polling Group, fewer than one-third were “very familiar” with the city’s history of school desegregation. Most parents in all racial groups felt their children’s school fosters an environment where all students felt welcome and included. A majority wanted the BPS to do more work to counter the long-term impacts of segregation, but those efforts were less likely to be acknowledged by Black and Latinx parents than white parents.

At the budget hearing on inclusive learning, BPS officials described plans for multilingual learners and special needs students, broadly affirming goals that were first advanced by parents and advocates. But the testimony from parents and grandparents, mostly in Spanish, was about unmet needs, not entirely unlike those outlined in a 1970 report by the Task Force on Children Out of School.

One example was testimony from Sonia Medina, a parent volunteer at the Orchard Gardens K-8 School in Roxbury, read by another parent in the City Council chamber. In December of 2023, Medina said she was filled with “sadness and frustration” when she saw immigrant students who spoke various languages struggling with a computerized test for learning assessment.

“I saw that some of the students didn’t know what they were doing,” a translator read to the councillors. “They were not able to complete this test: just to see in the little faces of those kids to be in front of a computer trying to achieve their goals, but they couldn’t do anything. It was very unfortunate that also the teacher wanted to do her job, but she couldn’t do anything because she only spoke English.”

Under pressure to align with state guidance on inclusive learning, BPS officials plan to assign more multilingual learners to regular classrooms, with support for English as a Second Language (ESL). In testimony to the council, the long-time education advocate John Mudd countered that ESL support was not the same as instruction in a native language.

If a regular classroom gives the learners more exposure to spoken English, advocates argue that instruction in their first language would still allow for subject comprehension at a higher level.

“Various ways of doing dual language programs have better outcomes than English immersion with the ESL support,” Mudd said. In October of 2023, he was among the majority of the members of the English Learners task force who resigned in protest against BPS inclusion plans.

Under the proposed $1.5 billion BPS budget for the coming fiscal year, most schools will get less funding, mainly due to the loss of federal stimulus money, and despite a proposed increase in city funding. At the April 29 hearing, Johnny McInnis, the political director for the Boston Teachers Union (BTU), relayed concerns that teachers in inclusive classrooms would not have enough specialized supports.

“The BTU believes in inclusion done right,” he said, “which means fighting for fully supported and funded inclusive classrooms, the services our students deserve, and putting an end to a single teacher having to do the job of two or more educators at once, which deprived students with disabilities and multilingual learners of the additional specialized support they need and deserve.”

Bilingual education in the BPS dates back to 1967, following efforts by parents and advocates. With the start of desegregation in 1974, Latinx and Asian-American parents campaigned for student safety and language programs that were in danger of disruption from the resulting change in student assignments. By the school year 2023-24, the two groups account for a majority of the BPS enrollment, with the state classifying almost 45 percent of the students as “Hispanic.”

After a sharp decrease in white students in the first decade of desegregation – 59 percent by 1981 – the number of Black students in BPS dropped by half in the first two decades of the 21st century. That change has been linked with a shift toward charter schools and private schools, but also with gentrification and upward mobility.

Some students of color from Boston attend predominantly white schools in the suburbs through METCO, the voluntary desegregation program started in 1966, whose enrollment total has long been slightly more than 3,000 students. Though METCO numbers for 2019-20 show a higher percentage of students with special needs than in the BPS, the program was far below BPS figures for students who were language learners or economically disadvantaged.

Despite years of demographic changes for the BPS, there has been little change in the racial gap in achievement reflected on the state’s MCAS assessments. In the scores released last September, there were lower percentages of Black and “Latino” students who met or exceeded goals for their grade. What’s not tracked by the state metrics are demographic differences and changes within racial groups.

At a May 6 Suffolk University Ford Hall Forum, whose co-sponsors included the Boston Desegregation and Busing Initiative (BDBI), some of those changes were noted by Ron Bell, who was bused to a school in Brighton from his neighborhood in Mission Hill during the first years of desegregation.

“Even in 1963, the year I was born, the march on Washington, 98,000 students were in the Boston Public School. Now it’s 48,000, 49,000, mostly Latino. Blacks are not the folks I grew up with,” he said. “They’re in Brockton, Randolph, they’re all over the state. I went to Brockton two weeks ago, and it was like it was Mission Hill.”

Another forum participant, Tatiana F. Cruz, an assistant professor and interdisciplinary program director of Africana Studies at Simmons University, suggested that the public schools are only one factor in the pursuit of advancemen

“I think education is one piece, but I’m a mother of three and I live in Dorchester and, like many, many folks of color, we have left the Boston schools,” she said. “And you can see actually mass numbers of African Americans in particular who have left Boston schools in the last decade especially. So yes, we need to fix that.

“African Americans, Latinos, all folks … whether they participate in METCO, whether they opt into an independent school, whether they’re following the charter school movement, everyone’s doing what they think is best for their kids. But fixing the schools is not going to fix everything.”

Between 2014 and 2023, BPS enrollment dropped by 8,299 students, or 15.3 percent, with the sharpest decline during the pandemic years 2020-22. According to a 2020 report by The Boston Foundation, the city’s overall school-age population decreased between 1950 and 2018 by 43.7 percent, following the pattern in other high-income coastal cities. Between 1980 and 2017, the report found the largest drop in Boston households occurred with children among middle-class families, even in years when BPS was posting gains in student achievement.

Despite an increase in overall public school enrollment, primarily because of charter schools, The Boston Foundation observed that the BPS had become more racially and economically segregated, with students of low-income accounting for 77-80 percent of enrollment outside of exam schools. “As a result,” the report concluded, “Boston’s public schools are now educating a larger proportion of students from low-income families who tend to have greater educational needs.”

Even Boston School Committee members who resisted desegregation efforts before 1974 acknowledged racial discrimination in housing, a practice that also reinforced market perceptions and values. Almost fifty years later, a report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found a racial housing pattern in Greater Boston that followed a nationwide trend, with 81 percent of US metro areas with at least 200,000 people more segregated in 2019 than in 1990. Because of “unequal housing choices,” the segregation that federal rulings confined to Boston’s public schools in 1974 had been transposed over a larger territory.

“Today’s high housing prices are also pricing Black families out of Boston, and the city’s Black population has leveled off even though the region’s Black population has increased,” according to the report. “Many Black families have been moving to newly segregating, post-industrial cities on the metropolitan edge.” 

In the 20th century, Boston lost even more people between 1950 and 1960 than between 1970 and 1980, which included the first years of desegregation. Due to housing and mortgage discrimination, there was less access to the suburbs for the Black buyers and renters, and less opportunity to build wealth.

Even within Boston, growth in housing supply from 1950-1980 was highest in predominantly white areas such as Hyde Park and West Roxbury, according to the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA). Over the same decades, the biggest loss of units, almost 31 percent of the housing stock, was in Roxbury, a predominantly Black area affected by urban renewal and land clearances for a highway project that would be halted in 1972, after resistance from local communities.

Another Ford Hall Forum panelist, Karilyn Crocket, an assistant professor of Urban History, Public Policy & Planning at MIT, wrote about the local resistance to the project in her book, “People Before Highways.” She connected segregation in schools to “the durability of residential segregation” as the “bedrock organizing order” of the United States.

“So we can talk about what’s going on in schools, or we can talk about what’s going on in job sites,” she said, “but, fundamentally, the fact that there is this lasting racial residential segregation will mean that we will always be in this return conversation to how can we get better schools, how can we get integrated schools.”

The granddaughter of a plaintiff in Boston’s 1972 school segregation case, Crockett suggested that part of the answer could be found by examining the history of movements for equality and community control.

“So we are very much in a future that people were trying to resist, people were trying to resist this moment of crisis where we’re still talking about racial integration because they thought they could have solved it 50 years ago, and they could have people pushing for a future where we’re not still talking about a housing crisis, because that’s what they were trying to address in the sixties,” she said.

“Even by stopping a highway, they felt like they were trying to make sure the people who lived in the city could stay there. And so we are in this repetitive cycle that can actually be broken, not by waiting for a bank or someone to write a check or for a superhero from outer space to come and save us, but by really listening to ourselves and our own history and resolving ourselves to the wealth which is already embedded in community.”

That also described the purpose of the May 4 hackathon on the racial wealth gap organized by Crockett at MIT. Ron Bell also took part, as a judge and member of a group focused on busing and desegregation. At the forum two days later, Bell said it was “mind-blowing” to encounter his individual experience as part of a larger story.

“We lived it, but we never thought about it.,” he said. “We never knew, could remember – I was 11 years old. And, to see what’s going on now and to look at the history, many folks say, ‘You know, we’ve come a long way.’ We haven’t come. We may have come. It may have been a lot of years, but we haven’t gone that far, as far as progress.”