Chicago's magnet schools were one of the nation's earliest experiments in choice-driven school desegregation, originating among civil rights advocates and academic education experts in the 1960s and appearing at specific sites in Chicago's urban landscape during the 1970s. The specific concerns that motivated the creation of magnet schools during the civil rights era—desegregating schools and arresting white flight—were decisively wedded to notions of parental choice, academic selectivity, and urban revitalization. While magnet schools enacted innovative curricula in self-consciously multicultural spaces, their scarcity, combined with their function as a spur to middle-class urbanism, ratified new regimes of inequality in urban education. This article frames magnet schools’ engineered success as a necessary prehistory for the rise of educational choice-and-accountability reforms later in the twentieth century.

Two separate school districts—a city one and a county one—operated independently in Durham, North Carolina, until the early 1990s. The two districts merged relatively late compared to other North Carolina cities, such as Raleigh and Charlotte. In Durham, residents in both the county and city systems vehemently opposed the merger until the county commissioners ultimately bypassed a popular vote. African American advocates in the city school district, in particular, faced an impossible trade-off: city schools increasingly struggled financially because of an inequitable funding structure, but a merger would significantly threaten fair racial representation on the consolidated school board. This article explores this core tension in historical context by looking at several failed merger attempts from 1958 to 1988, as well as the 1991 merger implementation, against the backdrop of desegregation, economic transition, profound metropolitan changes, and protracted political battles in Durham.

This article examines the impact of African American migration into Kansas City, Missouri, on the city's segregated school system in the 1940s and early 1950s. Substantial increases in the number of African American elementary school-age children produced chronic overcrowding in the segregated black schools, which was not easily relieved due to the legal requirement to operate racially segregated schools. In order to address the crowding, the school district was compelled on four occasions in the late 1940s and early 1950s to convert an entire school from white use to African American use. In each case, the school district took the symbolic step of changing the name of the school so that it was clearly identifiable as a school for African American students. The school district's practice of renaming schools coded those schools by race and further signaled that the surrounding area had become a black neighborhood.

Stanford University's indirect cost rates for federally sponsored research dramatically increased from 58 percent in 1980 to 78 percent in 1991. Faculty frustration with increasing rates and scrutiny from a zealous government contracting officer culminated in a congressional inquiry into Stanford's indirect cost accounting practices in 1990 and 1991. The investigation revealed controversial luxury expenses charged to the government, including a yacht and antiques for the Stanford president's home, which attracted extensive public attention. Stanford president Donald Kennedy admitted some expenses were accounting errors but defended many expenses as permissible under government rules. Stanford's aggressive overhead recovery practices represent the institution's struggle to adapt to a changing economy for sponsored research in the twilight of the Cold War. The congressional response, which included a cap on administrative cost recovery for all universities, highlighted how shifting federal priorities—from defense research to deficit reduction—strained the relationship between the federal government and academic science.