Nearly 30 years after a court ordered Boston’s city schools to desegregate (1974), school segregation continues to be a major obstacle to equal opportunity for minority children in the Boston metropolis. The issues are national in scope, but in Boston we see especially clearly how limited are the impacts of policies that are only implemented within city boundaries. Blacks and Hispanics are unusually concentrated in the City of Boston and a handful of older outlying towns and cities, while residential suburbs where most whites live hardly share in the growing ethnic and racial diversity of the region.

Also available at http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu