Q&A: The activist and lawyer who’s trying to integrate schools by race and class

Ary Amerikaner is on a mission to make America integrate schools again. 

A lawyer and education policy advocate who worked in the Obama Education Department, Amerikaner cofounded and leads an organization called Brown’s Promise. The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education prohibited legally mandated segregation in public schools.

The group is hoping to influence the national conversation, while also making direct change in a handful of specific states. 

Most notably, in May, Brown’s Promise filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts demanding more racially and economically balanced schools. Similar suits, brought by other groups, are underway in New Jersey and Minnesota.

“If public schools are truly going to prepare students to succeed in school and in the workplace, and frankly in our democracy, they need to be integrated,” Amerikaner tells me. The group recently released a report showing schools today remain stratified by race and class. Some research has found benefits of integrated schooling.

At the moment, though, pursuing integration feels somewhere between quaint and quixotic. Desegregation “busing” drew massive backlash in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, including in Boston. The Supreme Court has sharply limited how far such efforts can go. Even some Democratic politicians like Joe Biden tacked away from court-ordered integration. A decade ago there was revived interest in intentional diversity strategies, particularly in New York City, but this has given way to political ambivalence and a legal counterattack. 

I wanted to speak with Amerikaner to hear her case for prioritizing integration in 2026 and how she hopes to do so in Massachusetts.

Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What does it mean to say a school is integrated or segregated more than 70 years after Brown v. Board?

Obviously it's not required by law anymore, but our schools are still very, very segregated. The numbers look very bad across the country, and they're not getting better.

One of the takeaways from our report is that it is not just a southern state problem. In fact, some of the worst segregation is happening in the Northeast and the other states where they have tiny, super, super segregative school districts.

Why should we be concerned if students of mostly the same race or mostly the same economic background all attend school together?

It matters because separate truly is not equal. We have seen for years — our entire country's history — that so long as we go to schools in separate buildings, students of color and students from low-income families will inevitably get the short end of the stick. 

The second reason it matters is because in our increasingly diverse democracy, our foundational institutions are being torn apart at their seams along lines of race, often by design. The only way that our country can get through that is by having real relationships that are built from the earliest ages across lines of difference.

Within many states more money actually goes to schools serving more low-income students. Does that complicate your argument?

Lots of advocates, myself included, have spent decades trying to advocate for fairer school funding formulas, so that we put more money into higher-poverty schools. The research shows that funding matters. But it has not created the transformative, life-changing, different kind of schooling opportunity that we have seen happen at scale with school integration. 

In integrated schools, there are often still large test score gaps by race and economic status, right?

Yes. Well, certainly too often.

If someone says, "Well, look, we've tried this, and we still see these test score gaps,” what would your response be?

We've tried this, and what we saw was a 30-point increase in graduation rates, massive increases in adult income for Black and Latino students. So, at scale, that's the most compelling data. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Have we closed every gap within a school? Absolutely not. But is it moving in an important and right direction? Definitely. [In a follow-up email, Amerikaner pointed to studies showing benefits of earlier court-ordered desegregation for Black and Hispanic students.]

One lesson from the prior era of integration was that some Black Americans soured on the experience.

Yeah, absolutely. That's why we have said from day one that we are grounding our work at Brown's Promise in what the folks in the most directly impacted communities tell us they want. Are all Black people in America or in Massachusetts going to tell you this is a good idea? Of course not. I would never try to say what all of any group thinks. But we have spent an inordinate amount of time learning with, sitting with, talking with Black and Latino families.

Tell me about the Massachusetts lawsuit.

So Massachusetts, with all of its history of ranking near the very top of the country when it comes to academic assessments, also runs one of the most segregated school systems in the country. The state is truly running a two-tiered public school system. It is relegating more than 175,000 Black and Latino children to a second-class education in schools and districts that are plagued by high concentrations of poverty. 

That is a clear violation of its duty under the state constitution to provide equal and adequate education to all students. So we are suing them. We are representing nine students and four community-based organizations with members who go to school in segregated Black and Latino districts characterized by high concentrations of poverty. 

Their school districts are all immediately next to districts that are much whiter and lower poverty. And it just does not have to be that way. It would not require hours on a bus to deconcentrate this poverty, to integrate these schools.

[A spokesperson for the Massachusetts education department didn’t respond to a request for comment but noted to WBUR that the state “leads the nation in student achievement.”]

Can you describe potential remedies?

We are not asking for any specific remedy, but we did lay out a variety of ideas. They include expanding vocational technical schools, which enroll students across district lines; expanding magnet school programs to allow them to enroll students across district lines; improving state laws around interdistrict transfer programs and providing transportation to students who need it. 

Is district consolidation a potential remedy? 

Anything is a potential remedy. It is notable that there are so many school districts in Massachusetts. But it is not the thing that we heard from most of our directly impacted communities as a thing that was top of mind.

But isn't district consolidation the thing that's most likely to work? 

One of the lessons I have learned in my time doing education policy work is that what seems like it's most likely to work on paper is not going to work if everybody hates it. We have to balance those things. 

The remedies you mention lean into school choice a lot, right? 

Voluntary solutions are what the plaintiffs want in Massachusetts. We don't think action should be voluntary for the state — but voluntary for families in comparison to the 1970s and what many people think of and still refer to as “forced busing.”

Do you see “forced busing” as off the table as a remedy?

The complaint specifically says that the plaintiffs are not seeking that.

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