II. Introduction

Policy Problem

    The policy problem takes root in the subjectivity of gerrymandering. If one is to have districts, those districts will not be able to fit the needs and wants of all stakeholders, nor will they perfectly encapsulate the lofty goals districts are supposed to tackle: competitiveness, compactness, community cohesion, majority-minority, etc. There are simply too many factors at play to have a non arbitrary system for delineating districts, necessitating the interference of courts, officials, and experts in myriad forms (Wasserman 2018). Some districts it’s obvious—Goofy kicking Donald was certainly a blatant case of gerrymandering (Gabriel 2018). But, especially at the local level, how do we begin to sift through the thousands of different districts, competing interests, and unique needs and wants? It’s unquestionable that the school boards and local governments of different areas know their region and school system far better than an organized national program could, but can each district be trusted to settle its own boundaries?

    To further complicate the issue, where do we draw the line between impacts stemming from segregation and gerrymandering (Richards 2012)? It’s indisputable that both have contributed to the problem, but if one focuses on compactness, communities remaining together, and logical boundaries for school districts, segregated regions will only continue to feel the inequality. Fixing the school system without first addressing segregation is akin to swimming upstream; it requires a fight against compactness, archaic zoning laws, and the legacy of redlining. Solving segregation, while a lofty and important goal, is simply too much for this brief to cover, leaving the issues to be solved with a form of gerrymandering: Reshaping boundaries, not to improve efficiency, compactness, and pragmatism, but to allow for poorer, minority-majority communities to access the wealth of opportunities available in higher tax bracket communities (“Uncovering Pennsylvania's School Funding Disparity by Income - KRC” 2021).

Context

Gerrymandering began with Governor Elbridge Gerry and his, in the eyes of the Boston Gazette writers, salamander shaped district (Tucker 2024). Seen as an excessively spread out district, designed with the intent of creating a safe seat for governor Gerry. While Gerry lost the next election, the legacy of Gerry-mandering lives on. While the term was coined in Massachusetts, the first practical form of gerrymandering as we know it today has a starkly racist history: voter suppression targeting black males (Little 2021). White democrats in the South saw their majorities slipping with the rise of a new voting bloc, a demographic with significant reason to resent and vote against the will of the southern democrats. With the Civil War mere decades prior, the southern states didn’t have the power or audacity to fully engage in extensive and complete voter suppression, so contorting and misshaping districts became their path to consolidation of power.

    The 1960’s were the next pivotal time for gerrymandering. Not only did “party dealignment”, or significant changes in the structure and messaging of both parties occur, decreasing the effectiveness of gerrymandering, but landmark supreme court cases established the “one person, one vote” ideology, forcing districts to be roughly equal in size, and allowing for the court systems to weigh in on the maps drawn in redistricting (“What We Know About Redistricting and Redistricting Reform: Where We Have Been: The History of Gerrymandering in America”, n.d.). The legacy of both court cases has carefully shaped the history of gerrymandering since, with 28 states finding their maps from the 2020 census cycle challenged in federal courts (“Redistricting Litigation Roundup”, n.d.). The 1960’s were arguably the decade with the most democratic and fair set of maps, with bipartisanship, shifting party values and members, and strict court crackdowns on gerrymandering significantly decreasing the subversion of fairness in redistricting.

    After the 60’s, the number of split ticket and competitive districts began to fall dramatically. The reforms of the 60’s gave way to partisan divides, culminating in the project REDMAP, a project taken by the Republican party that ushered in the modern era of cutthroat gerrymandering (“The Redistricting Majority Project”, n.d.). REDMAP took decades of progress towards gaining republican control in state legislatures and used that power to recreate maps to drastically alter the house of representatives political party makeup. Despite having millions fewer in overall votes, losing the presidency and senate in 2012, republicans managed a 33 seat majority in the house of representatives. The democratic party fought back; the 2020 census and redistricting provided an opportunity to regain many of the losses forced upon them by the republican party, ushering the US into a (relatively) equal state of gerrymandering. While many might assume that, if both parties are engaging in gerrymandering to relatively similar levels, the negative impact cancels out, the opposite is true. The graph below, in addition to delineating the trajectory of competitiveness in districts, proves the impact of gerrymandering. If there aren’t competitive districts, we rarely have alterations of the status quo, politicians are held less accountable, and voter efficacy decreases. Indeed, these are many of the issues that plague the current political and voting atmosphere, with low levels of turnout, high rates of political crime, and career politicians withering away in safe seats.

With regards to school district gerrymandering, rates of gerrymandering are far lower than in the political scene. Unfortunately, the cause of the discrepancy can be attributed to the significance of segregation and redlining in altering the racial makeup of districts, cities, and area codes (Garcia 2021) (“one-person, one-vote rule | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute”, n.d.). With segregated neighborhoods and communities, those who oppose diverse schools and desegregation rarely have to act to maintain the funding and discrepancies in opportunities; the segregation does it for them. To make progress regarding school-based racial & financial differences, a recent movement has endeavored to counter-gerrymander, finding the act of drawing boundaries to prioritize these marginalized communities to be the most effective method of fighting segregation’s educational impact without solving segregation (Chang 2018).

    Gerrymandering is finally becoming an issue that carries name recognition, although its localized version remains crucially understudied. Significant efforts are yet to be made to address localized gerrymandering, and the prevailing belief among researchers in the subject is two-pronged: One, that we need more data, mapping, and historical understanding of how gerrymandering has developed locally, and two, that the rising tide of at-large gerrymandering activism will lift the localized gerrymandering ship.

Objectives and Structure

    The objective of this paper is, put simply, to shine a light on the complex and potent impacts of localized gerrymandering. As a chronically understudied and underfunded area of political science research, the first step towards progress is an increased awareness that the status quo of boundary-making holds problems at a local scale. These problems are masked by the visage of other prominent issues, with segregation and partisan politics notable among them. For the positive benefits it would garner, local gerrymandering is a relatively easy problem to solve. The boundaries they deal with aren’t tangible, all that is required is the redrawing of maps. While redrawing maps carries its own host of problems, when compared to many of the issues of the time, it requires far less investment, movement of people, and issues with capital.

    The structure of this paper will be a policy definition, focusing on efforts made thus far and getting into the weeds with data & analyses, followed by an analysis of said policies, and recommendations on future policies. No new studies will be presented, rather, a synthesis of existing work and recommendations uniquely built on existing data and case studies.

III. Problem Definition

Scope

    It is important to note that, post Brown v. Board, School districts were actively fighting segregation in their border placements (Richards 2014). This continued in Brown II, when it was explicitly declared that desegregation in school district boundaries was necessary: “revision of school districts… to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis” (Stadler 2024). Those efforts began to falter as the century waned; boundaries began to bolster segregation rather than weaken it (Reardon 2003). A study by Reardon & Yun found that “Public school segregation…increased slightly in the 1990’s, reversing several decades of stable integration patterns in much of the South” (Reardon 2003). Rather than framing this paper as a proposal for innovative and untested methods to counter local gerrymandering, this paper delves into methods of improving previous methods that had been working; fine tuning, adapting, and editing previous policies to improve their longevity and effectiveness.

   Much of the problem with localized gerrymandering occurs in large cities (Chang 2018). Large cities allow for easy gerrymandering, due to the (usually) large number of white elites who desire a quality education for their children, and the concurrent large number of less wealthy minorities in the same area, often segregated into various neighborhoods or regions. A Stanford study corroborates this notion, finding that large cities foster economic segregation, and that most individuals in large cities don’t interact with those outside their own socioeconomic bracket (Castañón 2023). Cities are significantly more dense, which allows for higher rates of segregation as the distance to get to schools or municipalities is far smaller, lessening the distance inconvenience for many. Additionally, the division of areas by major roads and highways allows for easy separation in terms of wealth, race, and amenities, which further lessens the difficulty with regards to gerrymandering. In the image below, the demographics of school attendance zones are clearly delineated, showcasing the lengths to which segregation is rooted deeply in the history and culture of cities.

Focusing on large-city gerrymandering allows us to tailor our approach to larger bodies of people. Solutions will be far different in high-density and low-density areas, and the acknowledgement that much of the issue is clustered in large cities broadens our understanding of methods to address gerrymandering in metropolitan areas. While smaller regions, towns, villages, and rural areas may have segregation and gerrymandering, it’s far less pervasive. One, people are much further spread out, necessitating density as a key component in district-building. When density is prioritized, altering borders to increase segregation is dramatically lessened. Furthermore, there isn’t the same spread of wealth and diversity in these less populated areas. Typically, less populated areas are more homogeneous and, by definition, have lower population density (“Ethnoracial Diversity across the Rural-Urban Continuum” 2019). These two aspects of non-urban life necessitate a focus on compactness; bus drivers, routes, and limiting the driving/commute time to schools becomes the focus, reducing any chance of gerrymandering or segregation in boundary drawing.

Policy Environment

    The policy environment begins at Brown v. Board. This case was the hallmark of segregation and ushered in a variety of dramatic reforms throughout the country. The first policy that became popularized after Brown was “desegregation”. Essentially reverse gerrymandering, desegregation typically involved the bussing of black students to white schools, often at a great distance. While this solution reduced segregation well into the 80’s, it was eventually rendered obsolete due to its shortfalls, notably, it’s lack of a long-term fix, the cost, and the excessive time commitment & unfairness to the students who weren’t selected to be bussed. The next solution that began to gain popularity involved what many saw as the obvious choice: integrated schools (“Policies Available to School Districts to Dismantle Racial Segregation in Public Schools”, n.d.). By building schools in areas between whiter neighborhoods and neighborhoods with higher percentages of minorities, integrating schools suddenly became far more cost-effective, compact, and efficient. Integrated schools face heavy challenges from those who wish to retain their homogenous and wealthier school districts, however, as they see integration and the incorporation of less wealthy areas as a change that would reduce the quality of their schools. As public schools are largely funded by their constituents, ie, their tax bases, they aren’t entirely wrong, however, their argument turns a blind eye to the inequality and faulty system in place currently. Yes, it potentially reduces the funding of their schools, but there are policy ideas being discussed and floated in legislators to divide public school money in a more equitable way than basing the system off of the tax base (“Your Question: Our Response:”, n.d.).

    Another critical policy is the school choice policy (Durrani 2023). School choice policies are currently in around 30 states, essentially allowing taxpayer money to follow the student rather than go directly to the school and providing the opportunity to choose the school that best fits the student or offers the most opportunity. The school choice policy has fallen flat in a variety of different ways, however. One, it bolsters private schools, a notable source of inequality in the American school system. In doing so, it reduces general funding for public schools everywhere, an undoubtedly negative symptom. Two, for many working class Americans, it is simply not feasible to choose a school that requires driving and picking up their children daily. Even if a school is better suited for the child or has more opportunities, if there isn’t a bus or effective method of transportation, the option is far less feasible.

    Much of the discourse and subject of debate regarding localized gerrymandering is the notable lack of policy within the sphere. The issue has been taken as one requiring little political intervention, with free market ideologies leading the way in how it has been dealt with. Currently, the supreme Court has declared that it is legal to gerrymander against political parties in a broad declaration on the blatant gerrymandering occuring in South Carolina (Lutz 2024). As more local policies are dictated by the larger, national ones, the signal being sent from the supreme court is that of gerrymandering’s legitimacy. While gerrymandering is not allowed with regards to racial groups, the defendant need only to prove that they were attempting to discriminate against their political opponents rather than, say, black Americans, to walk away with validated maps. The burden of proof associated with political party gerrymandering is quite easy to overcome, and gerrymandering against racial minorities is only made easier by the reality that political parties and racial groups tend to overlap heavily in their makeups, as well as the fact that democrats and republicans tend to live in monotheistic clusters. Recently, justice Clarence Thomas went further, adding in his personal dissent to the South Carolina case that the high court should have ‘no power to decide these types of claims’ in the first place, because ‘drawing political districts is a task for politicians, not federal judges’” (Lutz 2024). Justice Thomas declared that Brown v. Board was an overreach in terms of judicial power, and made it quite clear that his perspective entailed individual politicians or small committees guiding the entire districting process, with far less oversight in terms of laws, courts, and other supervisory roles.

Theory of Change

    The main method for change comes from increased levels of data technology. Increased potential for mapping out districts & populations through programs such as GIS and QGIS allows for the heightened ability to understand individual issues from a bird's-eye perspective. While still underdeveloped and niche, papers are being written on different computerized systems that map out districts without significant human intervention, designing those maps so that segregation is limited within reasonable standards for compactness and shape (Wei 2022). These developments are just the start, however. It is entirely possible to develop programs that analyze where schools should be built, how to change school district boundaries over time, and how to allocate resources to best mitigate segregation in public schooling. Even if a future where computerized models draw individual districts may seem far-fetched, tools to evaluate, compare, and edit districts are already in existence, with one popular one, GerryChain, being downloaded over 20,000 times (Roberts 2021). This tool allows for easy citizen access to district viewing, editing, and commenting. Not only that, but highly developed tools provide an objective methodology towards new districts, giving an easy platform from which citizens voter lobbies and commissions can challenge what they believe to be gerrymandered districts in courts, with the support of an objective program designed to unearth gerrymandering on their side. Clearly, the tools already exist to make leaps and bounds in the relatively archaic practices of redistricting, which currently entail a small, partisan group of politicians who make districts often overturned and challenged in courts (“How Redistricting Works”, n.d.). These tools, the product of which is displayed below, allows for multivariate analyses in order to assess in an unbiased manner the type and prevalence of gerrymandering in an area. Both the 2012 and 2016 maps were called back for gerrymandering, 2012 for racial and 2016 for political and constitutional violations, although 2012 was incredibly un-compact and visibly gerrymandered, while 2016 appeared fully normal and within reasonable bounds. These tools allow for analyses of districts with a wide variety of parameters, holding district makers accountable and easing the process of creating fair districts. While significant strides still need to be made for all states to be using effective and scientific methods for redistricting, one of the more prominent solutions is already made, with implementation the only hurdle left.

    Not only that, but competitiveness and voter efficacy are easily factored into redistricting models. As gerrymandering has increasingly been employed by both sides to increase representation, the next decade or so allows an unprecedented situation for disarming gerrymandering. Since both sides use it to relatively equal gains currently, as opposed to past skews in one way or another, now should theoretically be the time where it is easiest for both parties to give up gerrymandering, as it confers no relative advantage. As voters on both sides are disenfranchised, one would assume that both parties would prefer for their membership to be more interested and likely to vote, an outcome occurring from a reduction of gerrymandering.

IV. Policy Analysis

    Policy on redistricting is driven by a few key ideals. One, that each voter is entitled to one vote, in the one-person, one vote rule (“one-person, one-vote rule | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute”, n.d.). While this may seem intuitive, it becomes far more complex upon further discussion. Essentially, this rule mandates that each district have relatively equal power, that one’s vote in one region, area, or state is roughly proportional in terms of representation when compared to other Americans. Complications quickly arise with differences in states; a vote in Wyoming is worth far more than a vote in California for both the house and senate. The ambiguity and unclear definitions of equality with regards to voting has allowed for various interpretations of the rule, with continually developing court interpretations. The second key idea, enshrined in Brown v. Board, is one of equality. Districts have to be roughly representative of their constituents, and states have to have districts that represent their constituents at large. Often, reverse gerrymandering is required to meet these goals, eliminating the possibility of focusing entirely on compactness if proportional representation is desired.

    The first policy to pick apart is the policy of state legislators controlling their own districts. 34 states currently use said policy, making it the driver of a majority of the maps we see today (“Who draws the lines? - All About Redistricting”, n.d.). While a strength of this policy is that the legislators have a direct perspective into their districts and the political happenings of the region, it is, put simply, a bad policy. There is a clear conflict of interest in having politicians, who depend on votes and district lines to get elected, in charge of their own district lines. They have a strong incentive to keep a majority, keep their seat safe, and hamstring the meaning of democracy. It prevents significant change in leadership in the region, promoting career politicians and stagnation with regards to seats, limiting competitiveness to a few districts. With politics and electability as their first concern, issues more important to voters, such as compactness, continuity, and representation, are all pushed to obscurity. The equality of one’s vote is threatened in cases such as the districts in inner-city Philadelphia, where turnout is abysmally low, largely due to the fact that there are never competitive elections; democrats hold a strong majority in each election, so why bother to vote?

    State legislators drawing their own maps is an easily solvable problem. The first solution is establishing independent, nonpartisan commissions to draw the maps for the districts (“Who draws the lines? - All About Redistricting”, n.d.). With a number of states already having implemented commissions as a form of redistricting, including Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, New York, and Washington, it is clear that independent commissions are a tenable idea. With independent commissions, the maps are designed by experts in their fields, who, while likely having some politician leaning, aren’t running for a seat, responsible for keeping a district, and are paid on successful completion, or creating a set of maps that isn’t overturned in the courts. By putting the financial incentive, which would likely be quite large due to the significant work required, on hold until the districts are deemed appropriate and fair under the law, the members of the commission would have a significant incentive to do it right the first time.

    By focusing on three key tenets of map-making, compactness, representation, and competitiveness, enough constraints on the different ways one can draw boundaries will be established to ensure the effectiveness of these nonpartisan commissions. By placing compactness first, a focus on comprehensibility and efficiency is placed at the forefront of district-making. While compactness is not the most important characteristic—it is often hard to make a compact map with rural areas, for example—it is an easy one to prioritize, and by placing it first, the most egregious gerrymanders are prevented. Representation, as a key tenant of a healthy democracy, will allow diverse voices and perspectives to espouse their thoughts and act as a deterrent to excessive partisanship (Dovi 2006). If we draw representation into our school districts and elected officials, we ensure that the power structure that enabled redlining, segregation, and the excessively white makeup of congress today will not be the status quo of the future. In that sense, representation acts as a safeguard against policies and persons who would aim to serve their particular communities, socio-economic groups, or prevent equal treatment under the law. Competitiveness is an incredibly crucial area of focus in district-making, as its absence breeds career politics, voter apathy, and stagnant politics. If as many districts as feasible are made competitive, more and more politicians are held accountable by their citizenship and are forced to bend to the will of their people and, by extension, democracy.

    Another reasonable solution to the issue of partisan politics in redistricting would be the requirement of a supermajority (likely 66%) in order to pass a new set of maps. Many states, and especially those with the highest rates of gerrymandering, use a simple majority to pass new maps, often the maps called back by the state or regional courts (“Who draws the lines? - All About Redistricting”, n.d.). Implementing a supermajority would prevent all but the most partisan states from using their simple majorities to pass maps, requiring cooperation and agreement from both parties. While this may seem like a logical fix and conclusion, there exists a counterintuitive risk: excessive democracy. With a supermajority required, it may be significantly harder for a map to be created that both sides can agree upon, leading to gridlock and potentially not finding a new set of maps before they are needed. This creates a whole host of complications, from using dated maps with the wrong numbers of districts, being unable to vote, and leaving the state and national congresses in disarray. In that sense, it is socially infeasible if a conflict that prevented a new set of maps from being drawn came to light, as it would present a set of issues far more impactful than slight variations in the maps used. The role of the supermajority would be to push for more equitable districts, and if it brought gridlock and no new set of maps, it would fail at its role, likely requiring a return to the gerrymandered maps that created the problem in the beginning.

    With school districts in mind specifically, redistricting to reduce segregation comes in a double-pronged policy approach. First is the intangible; the boundaries of school districts and individual schools. While research on the larger scale redistricting has taken place, research is still in its infancy with regards to school district redistricting. One key study, LSABS, aims to digitize decades of school district boundaries to analyze the history and change in districts over time, and to use that data to better draw districts for the future (Koons 2022). In working with LSABS digitizing various districts across Maryland, I’ve found that there exists a massive gap in school district knowledge. Not only is there no generalized database of digitized school district boundaries—most are still kept on paper copies in various local administrative buildings—but there has been no check, no authority with regards to school districting boundaries. Districts have had to sort out boundaries between themselves, but individuals, drawing arbitrary and often vague boundaries, have been the main decision makers of district lines. The first step is simple: digitize it. If each and every school district in the country is digitized, electronic models, comparisons, and analysis with census data all become possible. Computerized models are increasingly becoming an arbitrator of fairness, largely free from the partisan biases seen in manual district-making and analysis, and school districts serve to benefit from powerful new technologies. While labor intensive to digitize each and every school district across the country, assembling the project from a national level with more than a small research team would allow for a relatively cheap project with regards to the impact it would make on segregation. The project would potentially encounter issues in terms of political feasibility, as many school districts, particularly in the south or areas where segregation ran rampant in the 20th century, do not wish to share their historical district boundaries. A national law, policy, or mandate may be necessary to ensure cooperation, as one of the key issues the LSABS project ran into was the lack of cooperation from historically segregated districts.

    The more tangible method of reducing segregation throughout the school system comes with brick and mortar schools and infrastructure. Most schools are in need of replacement or major renovations within two decades, making the next few years an opportune moment to relocate schools to areas where they’d better serve to counteract segregation (Merod and Arundel 2024). Redrawing boundaries can only go so far; if schools and population centers are divided enough, redrawing districts will not be enough of a solution. Rebuilding schools in areas between diverse population centers, spanning gaps between wealthy and disadvantaged neighborhoods, and counteracting historical redlining would significantly impact public education equality in metro areas. While potentially far more effective than the spatial analysis and technological impact of maps, the difficulty associated with moving school locations is higher, both socially and economically.

    Socially, fighting segregation in school districts is quite unpopular. A recent phenomenon, school secession, illustrates the lengths schools take to avoid the perceived negatives of being in a poorer or more minority-heavy district (Carrillo and Salhotra 2022). Whiter and wealthier school districts have been seceding from their larger district in order to join a district with similar traits. In doing so, they perpetuate segregation by lowering the overall wealth of the district in a rich get richer, poor get poorer situation. School secession illustrates that, while most individuals oppose segregation, they are willing to enable socio-economic separation in order to procure a “better education” for their children.

While anti-segregation measures and movements have broad public appeal, the results in individual districts tell a different story, as concerned parents, school board members, and administration assess education from a purely self-interested and monetary perspective. These hostile approaches to desegregation would likely be echoed if districts proposed building schools in more equitable areas or areas between neighborhoods with differing socioeconomic and racial makeups. While these measures may be approved of by the less well-off neighborhood, the richer neighborhood would disapprove, citing the lack of density, lower education quality, and higher commute times as a method of masking their thinly veiled, ulterior reason: Higher tax dollars per student and a heterogeneous student body.

    Shifting school location to better educate underserved communities faces a massive economic hurdle. While not uniformly true, it is often easier to rebuild schools rather than relocate and start anew, due to the litany of expenses associated with building from scratch. While for most schools, it is far more logical to renovate and rebuild, the subset of schools where changing location and property is heavily correlated to the schools facing segregation, particularly in large cities (Doctrow 2022). The schools with asbestos, light fixtures leaking PCBs, elevated lead levels, proximity to chemical factories, and pesticides are often the underfunded, segregated schools, making them obvious candidates for movement (Backhaus 2022). While many schools can close sections of their school at a time to work on others, schools with the significant health risks mentioned above would be far better served by making an entirely new school, rather than trying to address expensive renovations or band-aid solutions to unmovable issues like chemical factory proximity. While a solution unrelated to gerrymandering in the slightest, it simply isn’t possible to meaningfully address segregation due to district and school placement without looking at where schools are placed (Rothstein 2014).

    While moving schools may be a monumental infrastructure hurdle, the reallocation of funds is not. The state of PA needs 5.4 billion to close the gap of funding between the wealthy and the less well funded districts, a large sum when compared to PA’s approximately 50 billion yearly budget (Estrada 2024). However, much of the money could come from the federal government, which has been notably limited in recent years, making up only 13% of K-12 funding for education (Hanson 2024). Both federal government educational overhauls and changes to the way that states allocate and distribute funds could serve to alleviate this problem, as currently taxpayers and home values in individual districts make up a large proportion of school funding.

Redistributing and adding wealth to the school funding system could dramatically help many of the struggling US public schools while simultaneously serving as a method of creating jobs and boosting the economy (Allegretto, García, and Weiss 2022). School funding is associated with a countercyclical economic effect in economic recessions, providing a measure of stability when the economy faces atrophy. By creating jobs in poorer areas and assisting struggling public schools, segregation’s impacts can be mitigated as increased and reallocated funding builds off the benefits created by redistricting and redistributing school locations. Economic policies and financial reallocation are always a significant challenge to pass, although with the recession safety net, job creation, and funding of education as key benefits of the reallocation, it isn’t an unrealistic set of policies to be passed at both the state and national levels.

V. Recommendations

    While the recommendations below are quite broad in their topicality, they address the topic of the paper: the impacts of localized gerrymandering. Localized gerrymandering as a whole has been dwarfed in visibility by the national level version of gerrymandering, and as an effort in visibility and publicity, this paper concerns itself with addressing the myriad facets of localized gerrymandering, whether they appear in segregated schools, voter disinterest, or partisan drawing commissions. Rather than an entirely new set of arguments and framing, this section will give palatable summaries and extensions of aforementioned arguments, simplifying and categorizing solutions to best address the varied impacts of localized gerrymandering.

Recommendations on Segregation

• Expand digital infrastructure and digitization of school district boundaries, create a national database with historic and current boundaries to analyze impacts of segregation over time when compared with census data. Projects, such as the LSABS project detailed prior, have already begun this process; a scaled up database would be a miniscule item for the federal government, costing in the hundreds of thousands or low millions.
• With aforementioned data, create a program with the express purpose of finding new areas to build schools. Segregation is so entrenched in where we live that redrawing boundaries is a partial solution (Rothstein 2014). Movement of dilapidated school areas to places where more diverse (racially and socioeconomically) communities can be brought together will further alleviate segregation’s impacts on education.

• Redesign funding system for public & private school districts at both the state and federal levels to lessen the economic impacts of segregation on school district funding. Current education funding is in desperate need of an overhaul—gerrymandering and segregation could be the impetus for such change (Allegretto, García, and Weiss 2022).

Recommendations on Political Implications

• Establishment of independent commissions across all states to redraw district boundaries, put a financial incentive towards the nonpartisan commission workers to ensure bipartisanship and the creation of fair districts.
• Creation of a national set of redistricting guidelines, with compactness, representation, and competitiveness the three key tenets of said act, ensuring voter efficacy, diverse districts, and competitive elections. Research has shown that these are key factors in the creation of effective maps, and are ideas that—on paper—both parties claim to strive for (“Congressional Redistricting Criteria and Considerations” 2021).  
• Requirement of a supermajority to pass maps, ensuring bipartisanship and collective agreement on a set of maps before putting them to use for 10 years. This policy has been implemented with success in a diverse set of states, and if uniformly adopted across all states, wouldn’t benefit either political party.

VI. Implementation Strategy    

For much of the actions detailed above to be put into work, interest and funding needs to be directed towards public education. At some level, the federal department of education will need to take a significant role in coordinating the school district data collection and research and the funding of poorer/segregated districts. The federal government at large will be responsible for creating a code of conduct with regards to redistricting, as well as pushing states to enact nonpartisan redistricting commissions and the requirement of a supermajority, or passing a broader federal law that takes state choice out of consideration. A cooperative and effective DOE will need to be on board with the plan; the DOE has faded in power over the past decades and such action would be impressive from the regressing department, although the output required would be far less significant than prior actions credited to the DOE—notably, actions post Brown, the Morrill act, and the bolstering of the best higher education system in the world.

    State departments of education will need to be on board as well. Tasked with finer details regarding drawing the boundaries of school districts, coordinating new schools and district changes, and distributing funding to various districts and projects. With the support network of the federal government, powerful mapping tools, and the economic and social benefits of a better education system, the state’s role should be fairly simple, not requiring significant additional funding, rather, using the tools and resources newly available to them to better improve the education of their citizens.

    Arguably, the hardest group to find cooperation with will be the school boards and segregationist parents of the world. Convincing districts to give opportunities to others who need them more at the expense of the privileged is an obvious moral and social choice, but one hard to push on districts. Luckily, this group can be largely bypassed with greater state and federal involvement, and, with the addition of funding and the benefits of more economically and racially diverse districts, all the aforementioned solutions can be effectively put in place despite the complaints of the privileged (Wells, Fox, and Cordova 2016).

VII. Conclusion

    Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry would certainly regret the legacy of his name. Gerrymandering has morphed over the centuries, adapting from the relatively simple biased districts to an engine of segregation, voter disenfranchisement, and a perennial political talking point. Looming over monumental moments in US history, gerrymandering assists in explaining voter disinterest, political trends dating back decades, and Brown v. Board.

    Gerrymandering as a local issue demands discourse, research, and immediate action. With voter engagement, the efficacy of American democracy, and intense segregation and educational inequality at stake, addressing localized gerrymandering and—by proxy—each of these impactful issues has never been more crucial. Voters, school-age kids, and political parties all have an important stake in these developments. Voters lose the power of their vote unless action is taken, kids lose out on expanded educational opportunities, and the parties face disinterested voters and wasted votes.

With a relatively low cost, addressing localized gerrymandering combines anti-segregation efforts with empowering democracy, voters, and underserved kids in a bipartisan package. To this day, only 14% of districts in the US are competitive, more than one third of American kids attend segregated schools, and the stability of our democracy has never been more in question (“Gerrymandering Competitive Districts to Near Extinction” 2022) (Carrillo and Salhotra 2022). Action is required, and addressing localized gerrymandering provides a pathway to equality, democratic stability, and political empowerment.