Who Counts as “Our Children”? The Wilmington Debate Everyone Should Be Watching

The standing-room-only crowd at Mount Pleasant Elementary last week made one thing unmistakable: a regional moral struggle is unfolding in Wilmington schools over who counts as our children, and who is left to bear the consequences of an education system deliberately designed, decades ago, to divide responsibility rather than share it. This is not just Wilmington’s problem. And we should be paying close attention.

If you have not been following the school reform debate, here is the landscape.

• There is the familiar Suburban Narrative: Wilmington’s problems are so, so sad (we feel deeply for you and bla bla bla), but not ours to solve. Our district works. Fix Wilmington.
  

• Close behind it sits the Technocratic Narrative that has long functioned as a respectable way to delay structural change: Until the data convinces us, doing nothing is reasonable. And no matter how much information you provide I am always going to need more because this is my tried-and-true way of putting off ever doing anything.”

  
  

• Then there is the Equity Narrative: Your functioning district is built on regional inequality. Wilmington’s under-resourced schools represent a regional failure, not a local one.
  

• Closely tied is the Historical Accountability Narrative: We have spent decades saying no—and Black children have paid the price.

As a researcher who studies teachers in urban schools, the December 8th meeting where these narratives collided felt familiar. It captured a pattern my work returns to again and again: equity is broadly endorsed by self-proclaimed good people in principle while simultaneously resisted in practice.

To understand why this moment matters, we must start with an uncomfortable fact. Delaware’s original approach to both segregation and desegregation helped produce today’s fractured governance and concentrated poverty. After Brown v. Board of Education, resistance shifted from open defiance to boundary-drawing district lines that kept Black students in underfunded city schools while enabling suburban autonomy. This is the Northern playbook of anti-Black segregation: We’re not opposing integration. We just happen to have lines that keep everyone separate.

And the anti-Blackness was a resounding success. By the early 1970s, Wilmington’s schools were more than 70 percent Black and deeply under-resourced, while surrounding districts were whiter, wealthier, better funded, and protected from ever having to think about the folks they explicitly shut out. Courts ruled this unconstitutional segregation and, in 1978, ordered a sweeping desegregation plan. Wilmington was merged with ten suburban districts into a single zone.

The intent was shared investment. The outcome was shared resentment. Wilmington families lost control over their schools. Suburban families experienced forced busing and diminished autonomy.

It didn’t last long. Governance quickly tilted toward suburban dominance (the new consolidated governance was dominated by suburban representatives), political pressure mounted, and by the mid-1990s the state dismantled the unified system. What replaced it is what we still live with today: fragmented governance.

Wilmington, the state’s largest city, has no school district of its own. Its children are split across Red Clay, Christina, Brandywine, and Colonial. No district aligns with city boundaries. No single body holds full responsibility. Accountability is diffuse and resources uneven. And there are zero efforts to make the situation fairer for poorer and racially minoritized and ostracized students and schools.That is, until now.

As reported by Townsquare Live:

“The Redding Consortium, created by the Delaware General Assembly in 2019, has a statutory mission to promote educational equity and improve outcomes for all pre‑K through 12 students in northern New Castle County, including the city of Wilmington. By law, one of its core responsibilities is to develop a redistricting proposal for Wilmington and the surrounding districts."

If this were only a Wilmington problem, it would still matter. But it isn’t. Wilmington is simply a smaller, more compressed version of a regional pattern playing out across the Mid-Atlantic—and far beyond it.

Just north of Delaware sits Pennsylvania, where the dynamics look strikingly familiar. Wilmington is divided across four districts within a single small city. Delaware County, where my Penn State campus is located, is carved into fifteen districts despite being geographically tiny. Wealthy, predominantly white districts sit directly beside poorer, often majority-Black and Latino ones, separated by lines that determine everything from funding levels to staffing stability to student outcomes.

Pennsylvania’s 2023 school funding lawsuit made this pattern impossible to ignore. In a landmark precedent-setting ruling, the court declared that the state had systematically and unconstitutionally underfunded poorer districts while wealthier ones thrived—a clear indictment. It revealed how fragmented governance with local funding and racialized geography work together to reproduce inequality.

Delaware and Pennsylvania are not exceptions. They are microcosms. New Jersey remains among the most segregated states by district lines. Connecticut’s tiny districts produce enormous disparities. Maryland’s city–county divides, New York’s Long Island fragmentation—the pattern repeats. Boundaries become identity. Identity becomes status. Status becomes political resistance. In other words, what's happening in Delaware is a reprisal of arguments this region has been having for decades—responsibility, boundaries, lies about poverty, dismissals of structural trauma, soft and gentle ways of maintaining overt and egregious racism. Across the broader Mid-Atlantic, fragmented governance and scarcity-driven decision-making show up as daily working conditions inside classrooms.

But just because it has lasted so long doesn't mean we can afford to let this continue to play out much longer. Children all over this country continue to bear the long-term costs of political hesitation and fragmented governance—costs that compound over generations. And so, too, do their teachers.

Beyond the most obvious implications—will we ever be a nation that lives out our proclaimed ideals—what may matter most for this discussion, however, is how this all lands on teachers….again.

In my multi-year study of Mid-Atlantic teachers, educators described how they live inside these contradictions every day, expected to produce equity within structures designed to prevent it. Teachers are expected to compensate in their classrooms—bracketing racism generally, anti-Blackness specifically, classism, and structural trauma that others minimize, while keeping schools functional through sheer will.

Post-COVID scarcity makes all this worse, by the way. Teachers are not only managing limited funding, but fewer counselors, fewer interventionists, fewer substitutes, fewer supports of every kind, less control over their classrooms, less automony, and also attacks on the diversity related programs that gave them the little hope they had. In these conditions, identity becomes defensive.

Teachers, burning out left and right, frame their work around unsustainable endurance and sacrifice, even as good people in their communities vote against doing anything to keep them from being stretched thinner, and from losing what little stability remains.

That is why Wilmington matters beyond Wilmington. This debate is not really about governance models or district lines; it is about how structural choices decide who is forced to stay afloat in chronically unstable systems—and who is allowed to float comfortably above the water, untouched by the consequences below.

Despite these cyclical debates, across the Mid-Atlantic, imbalance is not being fixed; it is being survived. Teachers are left treading water as fundamentally racist and classist systems churn around them, and no one is even pretending to throw them a life vest. That is unacceptable.

Tuesday, December 16th, Wilmington has an opportunity to do better. Let’s hope the “good citizens” get this right. Am I wrong? Tell me how you feel about the situation in WIlmington? Also, is this playing out where you live, too?