Very few school reforms have been as fully implemented and successful as the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School's  (CMS) desegregation plan. Yet forty years after the plan was first implemented, the school system has largely resegregated by race and class. Our proposed paper focuses on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools' desegregation and resegregation experience and, looking forward, what this experience suggests for future desegregation, school reform, and public policy’s relationship to education, racial, and social justice in Charlotte and the nation.

The fact that Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971) and CMS loom so large in the nation’s school desegregation history is in and of itself sufficient to justify an investigation of desegregation and resegregation in CMS, especially because CMS is hardly the only school district to experience considerable resegregation. A more compelling reason, however, is what can be learned from how a district previously noted for its desegregation accomplishments has, since it began to operate as a unitary system in 2002, largely employed residential-based pupil assignment and essentially accepted the accompanying resegregation by race and socioeconomic status. Moreover, in attempting to boost educational achievement in its resegregated schools, its strategies aim to make separate schools equal. Understanding how these circumstances arose and their likely outcomes is relevant for other districts’ similar efforts and for larger issues of educational reform, public policy, and racial justice.

Telling the CMS’ desegregation and resegregation story requires a multidisciplinary approach because its experiences have political, educational, legal, economic, demographic, and normative dimensions that unfolded over four decades. In addition to the cross-disciplinary perspective we take, our central theoretical argument is that the trajectory of desegregation and resegregation in Charlotte illustrates the iterative interplay of structure and agency over time.  We use agency to refer to individuals or groups’ abilities to consciously influence their environment. Structures include laws, Supreme Court decisions, extant public policies, bricks and mortar facts-on-the-ground, the workings of the economy including the growing income and wealth gaps, operations of the political system, and prevailing norms about race and schooling. The case of desegregation and resegregation in Charlotte illustrates how actors' decisions at one point in time limit, constrain, or enable the development of structures that later shape the agency of others.

The paper presents the findings in three sections. The first section, covering 1971-2002, addresses key aspects of Charlotte’s desegregation experience prior to the implementation of the race-neutral pupil assignment plan in 2002. It includes discussions of the political economy of desegregation, development,  and school reform in Charlotte.  The second section of the paper covers the years 2003 to 2013. It discusses how unitary status has affected CMS, its students, and the larger Mecklenburg community. The final section looks to future policy and practice options as CMS’ leaders and others across the nation wrestle with the demographic, curricular, legal, policy, and normative challenges they face in the immediate and distant future.