Research

Durham, North Carolina’s 1990s debate over school district merger and student assignment policy offers a fresh case through which to examine a new era of school integration efforts. This new era can be characterized by four conditions: temporal distance from past desegregation implementation, lack of court involvement, the full availability of contemporary education reform ideas, and strong minority political leadership. The presence of these conditions makes Durham unique among its peers in the early 1990s and especially unique among the majority of 1960s-1980s desegregation cases. However, these conditions make Durham far more generalizable to how urban and suburban communities navigate tensions within school integration policies in the contemporary political and legal context. 

Durham’s merger and integration debates unfolded through three racialized political struggles, first over whether or not to merge school districts, then over how to elect a school board that would determine control over the newly merged district, and finally, over how to implement a student assignment plan that could bridge the racial and socio-economic divide between the former city and county schools. These conflicts pitted progressive white and black political leaders against one another over core tensions of integrative student assignment policy: how to implement integration policies without undermining minority political control and requiring unacceptable and disproportionate levels of reassignment for minority students. These tensions challenged Durham’s leaders to think more precisely about the relative role of integration, among other scalable education reform ideas, in improving educational quality and equalizing opportunity.

By examining how Durham’s leaders tackled persistent problems of racial segregation and inequality within a new political context, this dissertation is one of the first to fully engage with unitary-status and post-unitary status school integration debates. The Durham case helps reframe contemporary integration debates from a “desegregation” framework that centers the struggle over a required constitutional remedy for the harm of past state discrimination to local political debates on the costs and benefits, possibilities and limitations, and real tensions of student assignment and school district consolidation policies.