School district decentralization typically shifts authority and resources from central office administrators at the district level to leaders at the school level. Although decentralization reforms have been prevalent in urban educational contexts for decades, they often yield poor results for low-income, minoritized communities. In this article,…

This article traces the spatial history of New York City's geographic school subdistrict boundaries throughout the 20th century, exploring the historical relationship between race, space, and schooling in New York City and beyond. It seeks to both make the case for studying the spatial history of within-district education boundaries and put the…

For the first time since 1968, local education authorities in Washington, D.C. embarked on a contentious process of engaging communities as part of a comprehensive revision of the city's student assignment and school boundary policies in 2013. Despite the potentially divisive nature of the issue, public deliberation went beyond re-drawing school…

The ethnic and racial makeup of the United States has changed during the last several decades. Scholars have qualitatively shown how these changes affect school districts but have not identified their scale. We examine residential demographic change using a novel dataset derived from a geographic technique that leverages satellite imagery with…

School rezoning, or redistricting, is the process by which school boards draw and redraw school attendance boundaries. These boundaries are key drivers of racial and economic school segregation but can also work to ameliorate it. Using a critical orientation to narrative policy analysis, this study examined the cultural politics of race and…

Leaders of education policy continue to decentralize school districts, particularly in predominately large urban districts, despite mixed results from this reform. In this article, we seek to explain how decentralization came to fruition through the policymaking process in one of the largest and most diverse districts in the United States that…

On August 30, 2016, the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) and Recovery School District (RSD) released their Unification Plan to the public. The plan provides detail about Act 91 and the impending changes for local schools, teachers, parents, and students. The plan is necessarily detailed, providing an abundance of information on scheduling,…

The 2013 merger of Memphis City Schools (with 103,000 students) and Shelby County Schools (with 47,000 students) was the largest school district consolidation in American history. In its first year of operation, the new Shelby County Schools (SCS) commissioned CRPE researchers to perform a critical review of the district's readiness to implement a…

Nebraska lawmakers the week of April 10, 2006 approved a hotly debated bill to break up the Omaha Public Schools--largely along racial and ethnic lines--under a plan that critics say amounts to state-sanctioned segregation and that likely will face a legal challenge. Passed April 13, 2006 in the last hours of the legislative session and signed the…

Over the next few weeks, dozens of schools will open across New Orleans for the second full academic year since Hurricane Katrina. As many as 33,000 children are expected to report to one of the campuses in the city's patchwork of charter and traditional public schools. Unlike last fall--when many schools opened without textbooks, functioning…

Following the approval of legislation that would divide the city's public school system into racially and ethnically distinct districts, many Omaha community members and leaders mid-April 2006 expressed a mix of outrage, confusion, and disbelief. In this article, the author discusses the measure that calls for dividing any school system in the…

The nation's best-known civil rights group has jumped into the fray over a controversial Nebraska law that would divide the 45,000-student Omaha school system into three separate districts, largely along racial and ethnic lines. In a lawsuit filed May 16 in US District Court in Omaha, Nebraska, the Omaha branch of the National Association for the…

Beset with rising costs and inequity problems, Greensboro City, High Point City, and Guilford County districts merged to become North Carolina's third largest district, with 59,000 students. Although the superintendent had to downsize staff, eliminate special-interest programs, and refashion summer school, the merger yielded wider community…

This paper presents the Chicago Urban League's (CUL) proposal for desegregating Chicago's public schools, developed in response to the demands of the State Board of Education and to local resistance against integration requirements. The CUL plan is based upon revisions of administrative sub-districts,and allows for a variety of racial compositions…

Few educational responsibilities have greater far-reaching importance to the people of a State than the establishment of a sound local district structure for administering the schools. Keeping that structure adapted to changing conditions in society by reorganization of small ineffective districts into larger administrative units more capable of…