The Civil Rights Project at UCLA (CRP) and the Institute on Education Law and Policy at Rutgers University-Newark (IELP) today jointly released two reports finding that the racial and socioeconomic divide in New Jersey public education continues to grow unabated. While the CRP report documents the jump from 1989 to 2010 in quantity of apartheid schools in New Jersey, the IELP study shows that extreme isolation of poor students of color is concentrated in mostly urban areas. Both studies are products of close collaboration between the two research centers and are interrelated, but each develops a distinctive set of issues.
"In 1881, a New Jersey statute was enacted that prohibited segregated schooling based on race, one of the very first such laws in the nation. In 1947, New Jersey adopted a state constitutional provision that specifically prohibited segregation in the public schools. It is the only state with such an explicit provision. "