Dissertation Proposal Announcement Ph.D. in Education Program: Swati Dontamsetti “The Fight for Integration is Still Necessary in New Jersey: An Evaluation of Public School Desegregation Policies”

New Jersey has one of the strongest legal frameworks for desegregating schools. New Jersey consistently ranks in the country’s top 3 best performing public school systems today. Despite promoting itself as a state with progressive politics that is proud of its diversity, NJ has over 600 highly localized public schools and is the 7th-most segregated state for Black and Latino students. It is against this highly disparate educational backdrop that, in 2018, a coalition of advocates and families filed a lawsuit against the State of New Jersey to end its long history of segregated public schools. Latino Action Network vs. the State of New Jersey challenges state laws, policies, and practices that require students to attend schools in the geographic locations where they live, denying students in lower-income, isolated areas access to the benefits of a diverse education. Scholars typically agree that creating desegregated schools requires a combination of policy incentives that allow diverse students to attend school together. The most mentioned options are (1) district consolidation, (2) magnet schools, (3) open enrollment, and (4) subsidized housing in wealthy neighborhoods with “good” schools. In this three-article dissertation, I will explore three options – district consolidation, magnet schools, and open enrollment – using a QuantCrit framework to inform my usage of publicly available data from 1986 to the present and segregation measurements to evaluate the success of each desegregation policy. Each paper will be a multi-state or city comparison study that uses the situation in New Jersey as a focal point.