"This isn't a white school," the kid said to me and my three children aged 12-16. "We're fine with that," I said. We were outside a huge building on a mound of land that looked like a prison. We'd arrived in Boston about a month or so prior and were looking for local schools. There were two schools local to us, Brookline High School, which was in a wealthy white area, and Brighton High School, which was the one we were standing outside of asking a kid who was late for class to direct us to the office.
It had been quite a battle to register our kids for school. America invented red tape, and it's dense. I'd rung Brookline High school and was bluntly told that even though we lived a block a way "I didn't have a chance." Baffled, I began to look into the school system. Turns out Brookline opted out of accepting Boston Public School Kids in order to control who came to their schools. If you can’t afford the postcode you are not suitable.
In my last blog I spoke about how Boston children were bused into white areas in an attempt to integrate schools. The point of this blog is to begin to show that segregation in schools in Boston is alive and well - but not kicking. Why are people not kicking against the jams? It's perplexing. Back to school. Inside Brighton High School for our tour, me and the kids were excited. We felt like we were on set at American High School. The woman who showed us around was friendly enough but not effusive. I realised later that she did not expect us to enrol. We could have bused ourselves out of our local area but we didn't want to. We wanted our kids to walk the ten minutes to school; and we decided, it would be good for them to experience what it's like to be in the minority. The school is 5% white.
My eldest son went through inner London state schools, and I have written about class disparity in schools there. The thing about segregation is that it breeds poverty of mind and spirit. There is little aspiration at Brighton High School. One of the primary occupations of the often exceptional staff is crowd control. There are also a lot of educational needs as the school buses in all the kids from across the city and greater Boston who can’t get into other schools. There are lots of recent arrivals. There is an ICE policy. There is a child in Grade 8 who is aged 18 because he keeps failing. There are endless carrots designed to keep kids in school. The high school graduation rate is 62-67%. They have had the same heating system and bathrooms since the 80s. They had to close their on campus food bank which was helping many students due to city budget cuts. Boston is supposed to be the 30th richest city in the world, so why does the city consistently cut Brighton High’s funding? Teachers have to pay for pens and pencils and paper, and the schools track coach had to pay part of their uniforms himself, as they were unable to raise enough money for their team.
Segregation acts as a tool for systemic division based on multiple factors, not solely race. It functions through spatial, economic, and social separation—including income inequality, age-based grouping, and education levels—resulting in unequal access to resources, neighbourhood disinvestments, and limited social mobility. The children in my son’s class have very low expectations from life. My high school son’s best friend wants to be an aerospace engineer. He’s an Asian immigrant and works very hard. There is only one student in the history of the school has gone to Harvard. This was a child from Latin America who emigrated to America during his junior year and ignored and defied expectations. Ours is to reason why.
