The report released recently by Brown’s Promise and the Segregation Tracking Project told us something most of us in the General Assembly already know: Connecticut has some of the most segregated schools in the country. Sen. Martin Looney, D-New Haven, in his office at the state Capitol on Jan uary 29, 2026. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror We ranked sixth in the nation for economic segregation, 11th for racial segregation, and third-worst for what the researchers call “poverty packing,” which is the practice of concentrating low-income students in some districts while their wealthier neighbors attend school just across a town line. A state that prides itself on the quality of its public education was found to be more segregated than Alabama, and more segregated than Kansas, even 72 years after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. I have served in the General Assembly since 1981, and over those decades Connecticut has made modest progress toward education equity. I was a member when the Sheff v. O’Neill case forced our state to confront the reality that a child’s ZIP code determined the resources, opportunities, and future available to that child. The interdistrict magnet schools and the regional choice programs that grew out of Sheff have improved lives, and the state investments we have fought for in recent years have put substantial resources into classrooms that have suffered deprivations for too long. That progress is genuine, and I am proud of the part I have played in it. However, the honest assessment, and the one this new report confirms, is that the approaches we have relied on most heavily have not been enough to move the underlying numbers. Voluntary integration was never designed to be enough. It asks willing families to opt in while doing nothing to address the structures that produce segregation in the first place. There are three stark reasons we are where we are, and we should candidly acknowledge all three. The first is the anachronistic way Connecticut is organized. We have 169 towns with a separate school district for the overwhelming majority of them. Researchers and superintendents have noted for years that consolidating even a handful more of these districts into regional ones would meaningfully reduce segregation. I believe they are right. However, I will not pretend the politics are simple. Every time regionalization is raised, hysteria results and the conversation is shut down almost before it begins, because residents fear losing local control of their schools. That fear deserves a nuanced answer,  not a lecture. If we want regional approaches to succeed, we will have to build them in a way that earns trust rather than imposing them in a way that confirms people’s worst suspicions. Regionalism does not mean fewer teachers and schools; it means fewer layers of redundant central office bureaucracy. The General Assembly achieved a landmark breakthrough in regionalism by reducing the number of probate court districts from 117 to 54 in 2010. That enlightened departure from the state’s status quo and our debilitating tradition of hyper-localism have transformed and modernized the operations of our previously antiquated probate court system. We must build a consensus to replicate this profound success in our education policy as well. That work is difficult, but the alternative is to accept the numbers in this report as permanent. The second reason is housing. School segregation is, at bottom, a reflection of housing segregation. When communities use zoning to keep out multifamily and affordable housing that working families can actually afford, they are also deciding in advance who will attend their schools. Integrated classrooms cannot happen in towns that refuse to integrate neighborhoods. For as long as a town can wall itself off from any home priced for a teacher, a nurse, or a bus driver, the schools in that town will look exactly as this report says they do. We have made incremental progress on housing in recent sessions, often over fierce local resistance, and that same resistance produces the school numbers in this report. The State of Connecticut must commit significant additional funding for infrastructure improvements and property tax relief. The task ahead is formidable, but the direction is positive, although glacially slow to date. The third reason is the hardest to confront. It is a question of willingness. Despite the modest progress we have made, Connecticut has too often chosen the approaches that ask the least of the most comfortable among us. We have leaned on voluntary programs because they let everyone believe that integration is something happening somewhere else, to someone else’s children. The hard work, building the housing, sharing the responsibility across town lines, asking more affluent communities to be part of the solution, is the work we have been slowest to take on. In our recent major housing bill we have undertaken initiatives to be phased in, but we have not yet made the level of commitment that the problem demands. What the General Assembly has done is to direct more state funds to the districts that property taxes alone cannot sustain. In the recent session, we increased school funding by roughly $192 million. That expansion put needed resources into classrooms that have struggled for too long. For the future, raising the ECS foundational grant is essential. That funding gap remains not only because of a lack of will, but because our current state revenue structure does not generate sufficient resources to improve public education without increasing our already excessively burdensome property tax. Funding can narrow the resource gap between rich and poor districts, but it cannot, by itself, integrate them. The state must fund smaller class sizes, more reading teachers and literacy coaches, improve math instruction and services for English Language Learners, and relieve towns of the burden of special education costs. My time in the General Assembly is drawing to a close, and the work ahead belongs to those who will serve after me. What I can offer is the perspective of someone who has spent more than 40 years in this fight and seen how much steady effort it takes to move Connecticut even a little. We have moved it. The slight decline in segregation over the past decade and the investments we have made are proof that progress is possible. But this report is a reminder that progress and sufficiency are not the same thing. Regionalism, affordable housing, and our willingness to share what we have are not mysteries needing more study. They are the next steps, and they are harder than the ones we have already taken. The next General Assembly, the governor, and the residents of this state will decide whether we build on the foundation we have laid, or let this report join the others on the shelf. We have made some genuine progress, but we should acknowledge that it has not been enough. The children counting on our public schools cannot wait for another generation for us to finish this work. Martin M. Looney of New Haven is Connecticut Senate President Pro Tempore.     ...read more read less