Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ size helps prevent segregation. How does that work?
North Carolina’s countywide school district model can be a controversial one. But experts say it’s one of the forces keeping school segregation in the state from worsening.
There are 115 public school districts in North Carolina, including 100 countywide districts and 15 city districts. In about one-third of counties, school districts are the largest employer.
Charlotte and Mecklenburg County merged their school districts in 1960, and they’ve been one ever since.
State lawmakers have toyed with the idea of splitting districts into smaller parts for several years. This year, legislators filed a bill that would order a study to see if the five largest North Carolina school districts – which account for 31% of the state’s 1.5 million public school students in total – “experience any negative outcomes due to the large student populations.” That bill, though, never came up for a vote.
There’s varied data on whether the size of a school district affects student performance, which is why UNC-Chapel Hill researchers cautioned the state General Assembly against using the “mixed bag” of evidence to make decisions about splitting up districts when it previously took up the issue in 2018. There is, however, evidence that school size has an impact on student performance.
“After all their work and expert testimony, the committee determined that the size of a school district does not impact student performance,” CMS executive director of government affairs, policy and board communications Charles Jeter previously told the Raleigh News & Observer. “However, large individual schools do. Which is why our recommendation to this proposed committee would be to look at ways to create small population schools through a statewide school construction bond. The data is clear that choice will improve student performance across North Carolina.”
Arguments in favor of splitting up districts often revolve around the difficulties with making decisions for entire counties. Parents often complain when school is canceled due to snow and power outages in one part of the county while another part may remain relatively unaffected.
But, when it comes to preventing school segregation, countywide districts help, since students of different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds don’t become siloed into smaller, more homogenous districts based on where they live, researchers say.
Stanford University and the University of Southern California researchers determined most school segregation in the U.S. occurs when students are enrolled unevenly across different school districts according to race and, even more so, economic status. For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the country, was 74% Latino and 11% white in 2022, while the nearby Beverly Hills Unified School District was 9% Latino and 69% white.
By splitting up a district as vast as CMS into smaller ones, former Duke University researcher Charles Clotfelter said, there would likely be racial and economic imbalances among them.
“It would be very hard to achieve a racial balance or similarity of experiences across schools,” Clotfelter told The Charlotte Observer.
What can also result from smaller subdistricts is steep differences in resources between school districts in wealthy areas versus less wealthy areas.
“As soon as you start splitting these things up by geography, the odds are you’re going to have some districts that are going to be a lot wealthier than others, and there goes any chance of having more balanced opportunities for all students,” Clotfelter said.
In reviewing school demographic data between 1998 and 2016, Clotfelter and colleagues at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill found that urban districts in North Carolina saw smaller increases in school segregation than many other smaller metropolitan areas in the U.S.
“The feature that accounts for the state’s lower levels of metropolitan segregation is the large size of most districts. In the few areas where counties are split into multiple districts, segregation tends to be higher,” Clotfelter wrote in an article published by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research in 2018.
He points to a few counties with separate districts as examples.
Roanoke Rapids City school district enrolled more than 90% of Halifax County’s white students in June 2018. Meanwhile, the larger county district and small Weldon City district were both nearly all Black.
Davidson County, meanwhile, contains two city districts and one larger, mostly white, rural district. According to Clotfelter’s research, the majority of school segregation in the county could be attributed to racial disparities between the school districts.
Even within large districts, however, school segregation in the United States has worsened over the last 30 years. In 2020, the poverty rate in the average poor student’s school was about 20 percentage points higher than in the average non-poor student’s school in the same school district, according to research from Stanford University and the University of Southern California.
This story was originally published August 21, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
