The report, released this month by the education reform nonprofit Available to All, builds off The new report found overlaps and similarities among dozens of redlining maps from 1938 with school attendance zones in New York City, Long Island, Westchester County as well as upstate cities, such as Albany, Buffalo and Niagara Falls.��

The report also identified New York as “one of many states where a parent can be arrested and criminally charged for using an incorrect address to get their child into a high-quality school,” with one such incident occurring as recently as .��

The state’s laws and regulations make it “one of the strictest systems of residential assignment in the country,” the report said, adding it limits a to take advantage of — a practice that allows students to attend public schools outside their assigned district.

“There’s this paradox of New York, where it’s run by progressive politicians, it’s a very democratic state,” said Tim DeRoche, founder of Available to All, “but it’s the most segregated.”

Across the United States it’s common for sections of the same town or city, neighborhoods and streets to have communities that look vastly different from one another because of historical government-led housing segregation.

Redlining, the practice of drawing boundaries around neighborhoods based on race and denying mortgage assistance to areas considered “hazardous” or “undesirable” typically housing people of color, was more than 50 years ago. Despite this, many public services, including , still perpetuate inequitable access to resources and opportunity based on housing.

While school districts themselves are drawn through legislative processes, districts are often given autonomy when drawing attendance zones for schools. Both boundaries, the report said, “carry on the legacy of redlining in New York.”

“Public schools must be ‘,’ and … if you look at the system we have across the country, you can see that we are falling so far short of that — and the primary reason for that is that we assign kids to schools based on their address,” DeRoche said. 

The report used Public School 19 and Public School 16 as examples. Both schools are in the north Bronx’s school District 11 and are located about a mile from one another — a 20-minute walk — but serve contrasting populations.

The Bronx

Attendance zone boundaries for P.S. 19 “mirror, almost perfectly, the area deemed to be ‘desirable’ by the racist redlining map drawn by federal government bureaucrats in 1938,” the report said. Whereas P.S. 16’s boundaries fell directly in a declining area, according to the 1938 map.

The remnants of redlining are echoed in both schools’ data — where P.S. 19 educates a population that is 43% Black and Latino and two-thirds low income, with 62% reading proficiency. That compares to P.S 16’s 88% Black and Latino student body, 95% of whom are low income with grade level reading just over 30%.

Schools like P.S. 19 “become almost quasi-private schools,” DeRoche said.

There were many examples across the New York City Public Schools system, as well as several upstate school districts.

Manhattan

Queens

“It’s really hard to find a place [in New York] that’s not segregated or a school district that’s not experiencing either racial segregation or some sense of class segregation,” said Kris DeFilippis, a former assistant superintendent in the New York City Department of Education, who is now a clinical professor at New York University. “Not much has changed. … Wherever those lines were drawn [in the 1930s], it has largely stayed the same, unless there’s been a movement toward gentrification.”

In Albany, New York’s capital, New Scotland Elementary School was zoned over neighborhoods identified as desirable in 1938. The school serves a student population that is less than half Black or brown (41%) and low-income (47%) with reading scores near 60%.��

Just about two miles away at Giffen Memorial Elementary School, more than three-quarters of students are Black and Hispanic (84%) and qualify for free and reduced priced lunch (84%). Less than a quarter of students at Giffen Memorial read on grade level (21%).

Much of Giffen Memorial’s attendance zone lines up with 1938 redlining declining areas.

Albany

“You wouldn’t see these massive gaps [in demographics and student achievement] between two schools two miles away … if those two schools were truly open to kids,” DeRoche said. “The government has to be enforcing that in some way. How are they enforcing it? Well, they’re enforcing it with these maps. The kids on the wrong side of the line aren’t eligible to go to the public school that’s a mile [or two] from their home.”

In upstate New York, while there’s access to charter and magnet schools, school choice within a district is limited among traditional public schools. Students are generally required to go to the school in their attendance zone, “unless there are exceeding circumstances,” DeFilippis said, “but that is rare, it just doesn’t happen.”

In New York City, “it’s a bit different,” DeFilippis continued. Students typically attend a local elementary school before choice options open up in middle and high school grades across the metropolitan area  – creating its own challenges and limitations when it comes to admission to later grades.

“There’s almost like a false narrative that in New York City students can go where they want,” DeFilippis said, “but it’s not entirely accurate.”

For a student, traveling across the city to attend a school that works best for them can be difficult and it may also be challenging to get into competitive schools because they “haven’t had the same experiences at the lower grades that their peers have had,” DeFillipis said. So, ultimately, the current setup, “does not lead to equitable outcomes for Black and brown students, or low-income students, at all.”

The report recommended possible solutions for lawmakers to consider, such as decriminalizing address sharing, requiring every public school to reserve at least 15% of seats for students who live outside the zone and allowing students to enroll in any public school within a three-mile radius of the child’s home.

The underlying principle, DeRoche said, is to “just decrease the link between where you live and which schools you’re allowed to attend.”

“These policies have been bad, not just for educational opportunity, but I think they’ve affected urban development and I think they’ve affected how our cities work and don’t work,” DeRoche said.

Yet in many ways Canfield Avenue Elementary School and Shenandoah Elementary School in the Beverlywood and Reynier Village neighborhoods of Los Angeles are worlds apart. 

Canfield’s student body is 46% white, while Shenandoah is 95% Black and Hispanic. Canfield has a pass rate of 77% on state reading exams, but just 31% of Shenandoah students met reading standards this year. 

The difference between these two schools isn’t about curriculum or funding, but rather the highly uneven attendance zones from which Canfield and Shenandoah draw their students.  

School attendance zones are meant to provide L.A. families with strong options for their children’s education. But a growing number of critics say the outdated school zones of LAUSD reinforce educational inequality by locking needy students out of a good education. 

Canfield’s residential school attendance zone is 83% white, while Shenandoah’s is 55% Hispanic, 14% Black, and 6% Asian, according to research conducted by The Urban Institute, a nonprofit think-tank. 

“Such massive inequities between neighboring schools, both within the same local public school system, are difficult to justify,” wrote Urban Institute researchers Tomas Monarrez and Carina Chien, who studied the two schools for their 2021 “Dividing Lines.”

The differences in the nearby schools’ catchment areas is reflected in their enrollment, with 49% of Canfield kids experiencing poverty, compared to 93% at Shenandoah. 

Monarrez and Chien found inequalities in school enrollment zones in districts across the country in their Urban Institute report, but singled out the racial segregation and uneven outcomes of LAUSD, the nation’s second-largest school district, for special attention. 

The entrenched and segregationist school zones that populate Los Angeles Unified are the deliberate outcomes of a racist past, according to local parent turned researcher-and-author Tim DeRoche.

DeRoche, whose book, “,” explores school zones and segregation in Los Angeles and other districts across the country, said attendance zones ought to be abolished or completely overhauled, but admits it’s unlikely that’ll happen anytime soon in L.A. 

“The district doesn’t want to touch them,” said DeRoche of LAUSD’s school zones, “because families overpaid for homes within those lines.”  

LA Unified officials say school attendance boundaries are shaped by a range of factors, including geography, enrollment trends, and school capacity. A district spokesperson saud boundaries are reviewed and adjusted as needed to support students and communities. 

According to conducted by Realtor.com, California has some of the largest public school real estate premiums in the U.S., with some of the most expensive school zones.

Home buyers may think the unequal nature of LA’s school zones is a consequence of a tight real estate market, DeRoche said, but at least eight LA elementary schools have school zones that closely mirror the racist, redlining maps of the 1930s, according to documents he recently unearthed. 

Redlining maps were developed by the federal government for use in mortgages and color-coded neighborhoods by their perceived investment risk. Areas with large numbers of Black residents were graded as “hazardous” and marked in red, leading to decades of disinvestment and segregation.  

For at least eight LAUSD schools, today’s student attendance boundaries match those of the discredited redlining maps nearly exactly. If a map of the school zone is placed atop a redlining map, the boundaries are the same. Attendance zones for many other schools match those of redlining maps partially. 

DeRoche made this startling discovery about LAUSD’s school zones while conducting an investigation of the district for his 2025 paper “,” which showed how lower- and middle-income families experience difficulty accessing top LAUSD elementary schools.

The use of school zones that mirror redlining maps occurs in public school districts across the country, but, in Los Angeles, it’s more prevalent than the national average, according to the research conducted by Monarrez and Chien for the Urban Institute.

Redlining isn’t the only vestige of America’s segregationist past that shows up in school zones. Across the country, modern school district boundaries of ,” where threats against Black people . 

Many of the school zones within LAUSD were drawn decades ago, and it’s unclear if those identified by DeRoche were drawn with the redlining maps in mind or not, he said. 

But it’s unlikely many parents of students enrolled in sought-after LAUSD elementary schools such as Ivanhoe Elementary, Mt. Washington Elementary and Mar Vista Elementary are aware that their school zones reflect those racist maps, DeRoche said. 

Nick Melvoin, a second-term LAUSD school board member whose district includes Mar Vista, said he wasn’t aware Mar Vista’s attendance zone mirrors that of an old, local redlining map, until DeRoche told him.  

The plain-spoken former attorney said he wasn’t surprised, though, given the history of exclusionary education policy in L.A. County, where Los Angeles Unified is but the largest of more than 70 local school districts.

“That is something that we don’t acknowledge,” said Melvoin. 

Throughout the county and over time, a number of districts that are surrounded by and adjacent to LAUSD have carved themselves out of the larger, more diverse district of LAUSD, “so that they have a little bit more exclusivity,” Melvoin explained.

That list, he said, includes Beverly Hills Unified, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified and Culver City Unified. 

In a perfect world, Melvoin said, maybe the attendance zone around Mar Vista in his own board district would be changed, but a better solution is to offer options that give families the choice to exit their local school zones and enroll in better options.

“I’d like a world where there are no enrollment boundaries, to really make sure that we’re equitable,” he said, “but where folks are still choosing their local schools, because we just have such a surplus of high quality options.” 

Some of the non-zone school options for LAUSD families include magnet schools, charter schools and schools in the district’s Open Enrollment platform, where families may enroll in schools outside their zones, as long as there are seats. 

An LAUSD spokesperson said 40% of students enrolled in schools outside their zoned area in the 2024-25 school year, reflecting the pervasiveness and efficacy of the district’s school choice programs. That’s up from 28% a decade ago, the spokesperson said.

Critics, including DeRoche, say the district’s programs still don’t do enough to provide good options for families.

DeRoche’s 2025 report found enrollment is down 46% among 456 LAUSD elementary schools from their peak, while over half of these schools have seen enrollment decline by over 50% over the last two decades. 

The decline has left a lot of open space in 39 high-performing schools, but that doesn’t mean LA students are filling them, according to DeRoche’s analysis. In fact, he and his team found nearly 7,000 empty seats in the sought-after schools. 

LAUSD officials disputed the analysis, saying its use of peak enrollment to measure school capacity is inaccurate, because those schools were overcrowded then.  

Melvoin said the district is working hard to make it easier for families to access schools outside their local zones, by providing its Open Enrollment platform to make it easier for families to enroll, and also by providing transportation for families that request it. 

“Now, throughout LA Unified in every grade level, families have other choices,” he said. Dual language and magnet programs, charters and schools of advanced studies are a few of the options available, he said. 

Beyond LA, a movement to promote school choice and eliminate dependence on zoned schools is gaining steam, said Derrell Bradford, president of the national education 50CAN.��

Bradford and his nonprofit are part of an alliance of more than 50 nonpartisan education groups committed to ending discriminatory public school district boundary lines, called the. 

The coalition argues that school boundaries are based on a student’s ZIP code and, de facto, a family’s wealth based on their home value. Formed last year, it has set a goal of ending the practice in all 50 states by 2030.

States, including Idaho, Nevada and Kansas, are already working to promote open enrollment with state laws that modify existing school zoning policies, said Bradford.

“Everything about how people think about where you go to school, and how you get into school is kind of up for public discussion right now, in a way that I think is helpful,” said Bradford. “Its time has come.”

Family members and NAACP President Derrick Johnson spoke of the violent threats endured for years following the decision, which outlawed separating children into schools by their race. 

President Joe Biden met with the delegation of two original plaintiffs, about 20 descendants and NAACP leadership “critical in fighting for these and other hard-won freedoms for Black Americans,” according to a White House official. 

Several family members reiterated the struggle to make good on �����Ƿɲ�’s promise of quality education for all is far from over. 

“We have a lot of work to do,” said Cheryl Brown Henderson, youngest daughter of namesake plaintiff Oliver Brown, just after leaving the Oval Office. “… We’re still fighting the battle over whose children we invest in.”

In the private meeting, family members said they urged the President to continue that fight and support HBCUs. President Biden thanked them for taking on the risks required to push back on Jim Crow and segregation, including risking “your life, your livelihood, your home,” said Brown Henderson.

At least one litigating family’s home was burned to the ground in South Carolina. Many others lost jobs, compounding the challenges Black families faced in trying to build economic wealth less than a century after the fall of slavery. 

One descendant urged the President to consider a national holiday commemorating the landmark court decision so that its significance and history would not be lost.

“We have yet to fulfill the promise of Brown,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, adding that teaching “adequate” history is being threatened in multiple states. Last month, the organization for its “anti-indoctrination” law and alleged discrimination against Advanced Placement African American Studies courses.

“So the fight continues,” Johnson said. “It is a political fight. It is a legal fight. It is a moral fight, to ensure that we have a future that’s reflective of the demographics of this country today and not the demographics of 1950.” 

Earlier this week, scholars at Stanford University and University of Southern California unveiled troubling research that school segregation steadily increased in the last three decades. Experts say there’s an urgent need to reform how students are sorted into schools – four states require, and nearly all allow, districts to enforce attendance zones, which often mirror racist housing or sundown town boundaries from nearly a century ago. 

Family members called out the press’s failure to accurately document challenges to �����Ƿɲ�’s implementation and racial educational inequities being played out in schools today. They also voiced criticism for the administration’s military and war spending in comparison to education priorities. This week and late last month signed a for aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and other countries. 

“The truth about education in America? Are the kids from the Indian reservations … in West Virginia, or my mother’s hometown in South Carolina [getting quality education]? I say no. Tell me I’m wrong,” said Nathaniel Briggs, son of the namesake plaintiff in . “We’ll spend millions of dollars to buy an airplane and a bomb, but not on education.” 

Thursday’s event was the first of several NAACP and White House engagements commemorating the anniversary. Tomorrow, seven decades to the day since the court issued the Brown decision, the President will share remarks at the African American Smithsonian.