North Carolina has a storied history with school integration efforts spanning several decades. In response to the Brown decision, North Carolina’s strategy of delayed integration was more subtle than the overt defiance of other Southern states. Numerous North Carolina school districts were early leaders in employing strategies to integrate schools at a very modest level. When the l964 Civil Rights Act vastly expanded federal power, desegregation accelerated. In 1971, Charlotte-Mecklenburg gained national attention in the first Supreme Court decision mandating busing as a primary strategy to achieve school integration. By 2000, Wake County public schools became the first metropolitan school district to implement a class-based student assignment policy1, shifting from a race-based student assignment plan. Yet despite initiating school diversification efforts for a generation, currently North Carolina has reverted back to neighborhood schools while concurrently adopting policies that deemphasize diversity. Today, the state’s Latino enrollment, which has grown very rapidly in the post-civil rights era, adds another important dimension to the story. Since racial and economic segregation are strongly related to unequal opportunity, these changes likely have important educational consequences.

The study examines the growth of gentrification in California and its impact on schools and educational opportunities in the state. The study highlights the complex connections between gentrification, school choice, and school segregation patterns, finding the relationship between gentrification and local elementary schools largely depends on the specific city and community being gentrified. Statewide, gentrified neighborhoods have become more racially and economically diverse compared to those that did not gentrify, but the analysis finds only modest changes in local schools.

May 17, 2024 marks the 70^th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated schools were “inherently unequal.” At the time, North Carolina was one of 17 states that enforced de jure segregation, that is, segregation by law. The state of North Carolina and the school districts within the state have played prominent roles in our nation’s history of school desegregation. North Carolina’s public school enrollment is increasingly multiracial, and the expansion of school choice means that a growing share of students attends charters and private schools, both of which tend to be more segregated than traditional public schools. As the nation marks this important anniversary, the authors assess where North Carolina schools are now in terms of school desegregation, as segregated schools are systematically linked to unequal educational opportunities and outcomes, while desegregated schools are associated with numerous short-term, long-term, academic, and nonacademic outcomes for individuals and society. 

Northern New England, comprised of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, has the opportunity to plan carefully and intentionally so that the region is not plagued by problems of segregation and can instead benefit from the impending racial change and increased diversity to create and sustain diverse learning environments. There are no serious problems with segregation in northern New England yet, and those problems that do exist are modest and localized. Therefore, now is the optimal time for the region to reflect on what has occurred in southern New England and the rest of the United States, which were once as racially homogenous as northern New England but have since become more multiracial and more segregated. As northern New England is relatively early in the process of racial change, there are no significant responses to it yet. Without policies to harness racial change to create positive and successful diverse learning environments, segregation is likely to increase. In addition to the importance of planning for the future, children who are currently growing up in northern New England will need skills to navigate the rest of society, which is much more diverse, and should begin learning how to do so now. Thus, a close examination of these three states’ educational histories and their patterns of demographic change in schools, along with policy recommendations, is essential to planning for a successful future for an increasingly diverse northern New England. Northern New England, comprised of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, has the opportunity to plan carefully and intentionally so that the region is not plagued by problems of segregation and can instead benefit from the impending racial change and increased diversity to create and sustain diverse learning environments. There are no serious problems with segregation in northern New England yet, and those problems that do exist are modest and localized. Therefore, now is the optimal time for the region to reflect on what has occurred in southern New England and the rest of the United States, which were once as racially homogenous as northern New England but have since become more multiracial and more segregated. As northern New England is relatively early in the process of racial change, there are no significant responses to it yet. Without policies to harness racial change to create positive and successful diverse learning environments, segregation is likely to increase. In addition to the importance of planning for the future, children who are currently growing up in northern New England will need skills to navigate the rest of society, which is much more diverse, and should begin learning how to do so now. Thus, a close examination of these three states’ educational histories and their patterns of demographic change in schools, along with policy recommendations, is essential to planning for a successful future for an increasingly diverse northern New England.

This report examines educational opportunity in Buffalo’s system of criteria-based schools of choice, which offer their admitted students special opportunities not available in the regular schools. This system is a direct descendant of the nationally famous system of magnet schools which Buffalo Public Schools created in the l970s and l980s under the court-ordered desegregation plan, following the ruling that the school district and the city government had discriminated for many years against students of color and had contributed directly to the housing conditions that made Buffalo one of the nation’s most segregated cities. School choice has been a central element of educational policy in Buffalo for 40 years. In contrast to cities like Boston, which experienced major conflicts in the civil rights era, Buffalo achieved a high level of diversity and created a number of very desirable public schools with little overt conflict. In l995, however, the federal court ended the plan and cut off the funding from the city that had been essential to the success. The idea of widespread school choice remained, although many of the tools for creating high quality diverse schools disappeared, and a reduced choice system came to rely on a number of standards or criteria for selecting their students. Among those schools was the famous City Honors school, one of the first two magnets created in the desegregation plan whose opportunities produced strong competition and struggle in a city still divided by race and poverty and with a great many intensely segregated and deeply impoverished schools branded as failures by the state government’s rating system.

Building upon existing research that finds charter schools tend to be more segregated than traditional public schools, this report describes how charter schools also contribute to resegregation in traditional public schools. The authors explore the direct and indirect ways in which this occurs through a case study of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) in North Carolina.