The landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education outlawed racial segregation in public education, but it left open-ended the question of how to dismantle the decades old institution of school segregation and remedy its educational and social harms. For more than a decade after Brown, efforts to desegregate local school districts stalled as lawyers and public officials questioned the scope and implications of the ruling, but by the early 1970s, law, policy, and public debate coalesced around a single interpretation of the policy instruments and guiding rationale of school desegregation reform. Since the post-civil rights period, leading progressive voices in school reform consistently invoke the premise, rooted in social science research, that sorting students to achieve the right mix of race and class groups in each school is the only effective solution to persisting racial disparities in academic achievement. Before the late 1960s, however, the causes of educational inequality and the inherent educational benefits of racial mixing were widely disputed among leading reformers and experts. A new dominant body of social science expertise on educational inequality developed during the civil rights era to influence scholarly debate and articulate what quickly became the dominant version of the school desegregation agenda.

To understand the history and limits of our contemporary discourse of school integration, this dissertation asks how politically influential knowledge about school segregation and inequality developed amidst the polarizing racial controversies and political crises of the 1960s. Mass movements in cities outside the South and persisting pressure for federal intervention raised urgent questions about the legal status and educational implications of school segregation across the country, and the federal government initiated a series of research initiatives intended to expose racial educational inequities and justify a bold national school desegregation agenda. The most important product of this government-sponsored research effort was the 1966 Coleman Report, a landmark study well-known for its lasting influence on school desegregation policy and scholarly research on educational inequality. Combining approaches in Science and Technology Studies with Critical Race Theory, my research investigates the historical conditions that made possible the creation and ascendance of the Coleman Report and its influential scholarly framework for analyzing racial educational inequity.

Moving between local and national scales, this dissertation draws on the archived files of federal government agencies and leading experts, the public hearings, administrative reports, and commissioned research of major urban school systems, and a case study of community-based protest and the local politics of knowledge in Chicago’s public schools. It traces the circulation of ideas and information between local school districts and federal government agencies to demonstrate how the local repression of black activists’ perspectives in official reporting on urban education combined with the circumstances of federal government-sponsored policy research to dictate the narrow purview of national research. Political constraints from above and below, thus, translated complex local controversies about the schooling process into a debate about school resources and student attributes, reproducing local relations of racial repression in the apparently neutral theories and methods of social science research. This sociological history of education expertise offers a new perspective on the outcomes of the civil rights movement and on the progressive orthodoxy in current school reform debates. I call for a re-examination of the relationship between the state, public policy, and social science research, and a new understanding of the problem school segregation and racial educational inequality that centers histories of racist violence and institutional sabotage. In short, this dissertation challenges expert discourses that sanitize the history of school segregation, and it elevates race-based demands to redevelop black community institutions.