A new lawsuit against the state of Massachusetts alleges that Massachusetts is violating its own constitution by denying Black and Latino students equal educational opportunities.
The lawsuit, filed in Suffolk County Superior Court Wednesday, alleges that state policies have led to tens of thousands students concentrated in racially segregated school districts.
“The students live in communities that are intensely segregated,” said Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs.
“They live in places where they go to school with kids who look like them for the most part. They live in communities like Springfield and Lawrence and Brockton, among others — all places where they are denied the ability to learn with and from other students across lines of difference.”
The lawsuit claims that Massachusetts operates a “two-tiered” school system, where a number of the highest-performing schools in the country contrast with school districts that are “defined by concentrated poverty.”
“Massachusetts is known for having some of the top-ranked public schools in the country, but that’s not actually true for many of the students in the state,” said Ary Amerikaner, executive director at Brown’s Promise, a Washington D.C.-based schools-focused nonprofit.
Jacqueline Reis, communication director for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said the state is committed to equality.
“The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education believes that all students, no matter their income level, race/ethnicity, language, or disability, deserve schools where they are known, valued, and have the support they need to succeed,” Reis said in a statement to GBH News. “Massachusetts leads the nation in student achievement, and we are committed to building on this progress to strengthen our education system for every student in our state.”
In addition to Boston, the lawsuit names several Gateway Cities, including Springfield, Holyoke, Brockton, Lawrence and Lynn, as examples of segregated school districts where there is high teacher turnover and inadequate facilities. Nine of the student plaintiffs and community organizations come from those communities, also represented by Brown’s Promise and WilmerHale. The individual school districts are not named as defendants.
Local school districts did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
One of the lead plantiffs, Juanita Batchelor, is a grandparent and legal guardian of a seventh grader in Springfield public schools. As a Springfield resident for decades, with her kids and now grandkids in the school system, she says she has “watched the same problems repeat themselves for decades,” including teacher turnover, inexperienced teachers, low number of advanced courses, lack of mental health support, and limited resources overall.
In 2024, the state’s Racial Imbalance Advisory Council found that 63% of public schools in the state meet the definition of being segregated. The segregation is a result of longstanding policies that link school funding to municipalities where the history of racism has created inequality, according to Amerikaner.
“The state has a long history of connecting school and educational opportunities to residents, and residential neighborhoods are extremely segregated,” the attorney said. “So what they’re doing essentially is locking in patterns of residential segregation into the schools across the state.”
That history also creates conditions outside of the classroom that make learning difficult for these students.
“When you come to school … if you don’t have enough food, if you have health issues, it makes for a very challenging environment in which to teach and learn,” she said.
The lawsuit is asking that the court proclaim that Massachusetts is violating the students’ constitutional right to an equal education. It points to several policies that would make the system more equitable, including building better infrastructure, creating more vocational schools and magnet school programs and allowing more students to be able to attend programs in other districts.
It also calls to grow the historic METCO program, founded in the 1960s to address segregation by allowing students of color from Boston to study in suburban districts.
Another plaintiff in this case, Saudi Pelegrin-Gomez, took part in METCO when she was younger. The program allowed her to study in Wakefield. Ideally, she says she would have wanted to place her children in the METCO program but she says it wasn’t an option for Brockton. “More kids deserve the opportunity, Brockton shouldn’t be excluded,” she said.
“Ultimately, we shouldn’t have to leave our community to get a decent education, we should have options,” Pelegrin-Gomez said.
The lawsuit comes soon after a national report found that low-income students are still lagging behind post-pandemic.
Math and reading scores show some Massachusetts towns like Cambridge are outperforming their peers, while students in Gateway Cities like Springfield, Lynn, Everett and Revere are still more than one full grade behind benchmarks from 2019.
“We hope that the state will be as aggressive as possible to protect the Black and Latino students that are directly impacted by the systemic failure of integrating the schools,” said Espinoza-Madrigal.
