Gothamist
A non-profit newsroom, powered by WNYC.
Gothamist
Listen Live
News
In NJ, AAPI students find community and exclusion among segregated schools
By
Tiffany Hanssen
and
Louis C. Hochman
Published Jul 17, 2023
Share
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Never miss a story
Email address
By submitting your information, you're agreeing to receive communications from New York Public Radio in accordance with our Terms .
Courtesy of Central Desi
By
Tiffany Hanssen
and
Louis C. Hochman
Published Jul 17, 2023
Share
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
We rely on your support to make local news available to all
Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2026. Donate today
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
New Jersey has some of the most segregated schools in the nation. A 2017 report by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA found the state's schools were the sixth most segregated for Black students, and the seventh for Latino students. Activists and educators alike say when students from marginalized communities don't have access to diverse educational environments, they suffer, finding fewer opportunities to advance, to go on to college and to wind up in good jobs.
Those issues are at the heart of a lawsuit that could find the state's public schools are unconstitutionally segregated, and make lawmakers responsible for finding solutions. It's an issue deeply intertwined with housing policy — because in New Jersey, with its roughly 600 school districts, where you live closely determines where you go to school.
But in New Jersey, there's been far less discussion about what that kind of segregation means for the state's growing Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.
Ambreen Ali, author of the Central Desi newsletter and website, recently engaged an in-depth discussion with students, educators and parents about what diversity and segregation mean to the AAPI experience. A transcript of her conversation with WNYC's Tiffany Hanssen about her takeaways appears below. It has been lightly edited for clarity.
Tiffany Hanssen: Can you give us a sense of what the situation is like in New Jersey schools: how integrated or how segregated are they?
Ambreen Ali: It really varies depending on what kind of school those Asian American students are in. Now, 68 schools in the state are majority Asian American and 16 of them are actually more than 75% Asian. That's highly unusual compared to other states around the country. Asian Americans make up 10% of the state's population, which isn't that large.
But if you are going to a school like John Adams Middle School in Edison, New Jersey, 87% of your peers are Asian and most of them are Indian. That means that only 5% of the people that you go to school with are Black, 3% each are Hispanic or white. That is very unusual, and it gives these students a very skewed perspective of what it's like to be in a diverse state, which is what we have.
Now, of course, other parts of the state are the opposite. They are mostly white schools, and they might only have single -digit Asian American populations, which means that in those cases, the Asian American students are minorities.
One of the students I spoke to, Christina Huang, is a graduate of Ridgewood High School, which was a predominantly white school. She said that she and the other students of color regularly encountered being mocked because their parents had accents or even were called racial slurs. Here's what she told me:
"I definitely think a lot of these issues would not happen if there were more representation within the student body, and it wasn't that there were a few of us clinging to each other being like, 'This is happening. You know, they're putting up "white lives matter stickers around the school. They're drawing swastikas in the bathroom.'"
All right, so Christina is a student. You also spoke with parents, one who lives in a predominantly Asian community, but it used to be a majority-white suburb. I'm curious what's influencing how these communities are developing and why they are sometimes clustering together this way?
Housing in New Jersey is really a complex issue, and like many places in the country, is unfortunately a pretty racially charged issue. As you know, not too many decades ago, there was active redlining in New Jersey and other places, which means that certain certain demographics of people were not welcome to live in certain places. And so the aftermath of that and ongoing sort of discrimination around housing is one piece of why we see that the schools are so segregated.
The parent that I spoke to — her children go to the West Windsor School District. West Windsor is a suburb of Princeton, and it used to be a majority white suburb when she moved there. But today it is predominantly Asian and the school district is 72% Asian. And what she told me is that she had moved there because she wanted to give her children a diverse environment. But as the years went by, the Asian population increased. She felt that white flight was happening and that the school got more and more segregated.
So part of that is just based on how people live, prefer to live and where they're choosing to live. And I think that some of those issues are just really deep-set and it's hard to put a finger on why people make those choices, but certainly those have an impact on how the schools are structured.
Well, what have folks said about their experiences for AAPI students in majority-AAPI schools vs. AAPI students in majority-white schools, or in schools that are actually even maybe more diverse overall.?
Regardless of what kind of school you're in, whether you are part of the majority or you're part of the minority, the fact is that New Jersey schools are highly segregated, which means that there is one dominant demographic that is kind of either the one that you're part of or the one that you're not part of.
And so for Asian Americans, as I mentioned at John Adams, which is nearly 90% Asian, that means that they are not being exposed to people of other cultures. And one teacher I spoke to who taught there said that very small minority of Black and Hispanic students that go to that school are discriminated against. They are sort of seen as the troublemakers, or they're isolated to certain classes.
So that experience, if you flip it around for Asian-American students who are in predominantly white schools such as Christina — she mentioned the swastika and the "white lives matter," the feeling that she couldn't be her full self at school. So she's experiencing that kind of discrimination.
This teacher, Michael Trumbauer, made a great point that regardless of which side you're on, these students are not getting a full worldview as they go through our schools, which otherwise are seen as pretty good schools.
With all of the folks that you've spoken with, what would they like to see happen in terms of diversity in New Jersey schools?
The people I spoke with are community members, students, educators and parents. They're not really policy experts, but all of them were really interested in seeing the state be more creative and open to ways that you can desegregate — whether that's having magnet schools where students are moved around or changes in busing, as we've seen in the South Orange Maplewood District.
There are definitely parts of the state that are experimenting with it, and I think that some sort of policy change, there's an appetite for that, regardless of what the details are.
And of course, any change that's made is not perfect, but I think that, the consensus is that right now the status quo is not good enough for a state that's one of the most diverse in the nation.
Segregated NJ
In study after study, New Jersey — despite its diverse overall population — has been found to have one of the most segregated public school systems in the country. More than a dozen newsrooms covering New Jersey have come together to explain how it came to this, what might be done about it and how segregation affects the student experience.
The series, Segregated, includes reporting from Gothamist and WNYC, NJ Spotlight News, Chalkbeat Newark and newsrooms serving several communities. The continuing reporting can be found at SegregatedNJ.org.
Tagged
education
new jersey
Race And Justice Unit
Tiffany Hanssen
Tiffany is a host on WNYC. You can hear her regularly on Saturdays and Sundays during All Things Considered.
Read more
Louis C. Hochman
After about two decades in (mostly) New Jersey-focused commercial print, digital and digital-but-radio-adjacent news, Lou stumbled into member-supported news in early 2021, as the editor and CEO of Montclair Local. There, he (hopes he) expanded enterprise, brought more sophistication to digital storytelling and moved the nonprofit newsroom closer to long-term financial sustainability. He helped lead the Local to its fourth consecutive General Excellence award from the New Jersey Press Association — the NJPA's highest honor with judges noting the paper's work to strip away layers of government opacity, to hold power to account, to make news accessible for more members of the community, to share the stories and concerns of more facets of the community and to tell compelling stories across multiple media. He's excited to continue the same ethic — news as a public service — at NYPR as the New Jersey and suburbs editor, drawing on the extraordinary talents of reporters including Karen Yi and Nancy Solomon. Lou lives in Philly (that commute!) with his partner and their two cats, about whom and about which he speaks incessantly.
Read more
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
MORE news
ICE agent fires 7 rounds, shoots man in neck in NYC's Marble Hill, NYPD says
Police say the man arrived at a hospital in stable condition and a 5-year-old boy in his SUV is safe.
By
Giulia Heyward
and
Arya Sundaram
Published Oct 8, 2026 at 5:33 p.m. ET
Modified Oct 8, 2026 at 11:48 p.m. ET
Lazy drivers in Prospect Heights lose chance for 1 less day of alternate-side parking
A pilot found that drivers actually complied with alternate-side less when fewer days were in effect.
By
Liam Quigley
News
Lazy drivers in Prospect Heights lose chance for 1 less day of alternate-side parking
A pilot found that drivers actually complied with alternate-side less when fewer days were in effect.
By
Liam Quigley
Jersey City mayor shakes up staff amid $255M budget gap
By
Michael Sol Warren
Bronx residents will be exempt from new Medicaid work rule, state officials say
By
Caroline Lewis
MTA chair accuses Andy Byford, who's leading Penn Station rebuild, of going 'full MAGA'
By
Stephen Nessen
and
Carol Chen
Never miss a story
Catch up on the most important headlines with a roundup of essential NYC stories, delivered to your inbox daily.
Sign upEmail address
By submitting your information, you're agreeing to receive communications from New York Public Radio in accordance with our Terms .