Color of Education is a partnership between the Dudley Flood Center for Educational Equity and Opportunity, Public School Forum of North Carolina, the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, and the Center for Child and Family Policy. The Color of Education Summit brings together educators, policymakers, researchers, students, parents, community members, and other key stakeholders focused on achieving racial equity and eliminating racial disparities in education.

Sandra Wilcox Conway of Conway and Associates also provided key partnership design for Color of Education. The partnership seeks to build bridges across the fields of research, policy, and practice and bring together the knowledge and perspectives of communities, educators, policymakers, experts and other key stakeholders focused on achieving racial equity and dismantling systemic racism in education across the state of North Carolina.

In October 2016, the Public School Forum of North Carolina published the final report from their Committee on Racial Equity, a central focus of the Forum’s Study Group XVI: Expanding Education Opportunity in North Carolina research. The Study Group’s Committee on Racial Equity report highlighted seven domains of racial inequity in education: school resegregation, the opportunity gap, teacher diversity, culturally responsive pedagogy, discipline disparities, overrepresentation of students of color in special education, and lack of access to advanced coursework for students of color. With the issue domains identified, the Forum began creating a pathway to move this work and the report’s findings forward in North Carolina.

Valuing the role of unbiased, evidence-based information in their theory of change model, in August 2017, the Public School Forum of North Carolina partnered with Policy Bridge at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy to seek ways to continue highlighting the seven domains by forming connections with Duke scholars working on issues of race, education and equity. With the hope that Duke’s scholarly insight would inform and strengthen the potential for improving policy and practice in the state, Policy Bridge began convening regular meetings between the Public School Forum and researchers from the Sanford School of Public Policy, the Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity, and other entities at Duke.

These research discussions continued into early 2018 by which there seemed to be a natural synergy between Public School Forum’s racial equity goals and the Cook Center’s mission to expand quality education by offering policy solutions that address inequality and its effects. In May 2018, the joint group agreed to pursue a long-term, shared initiative to combine their missions to create change on the seven domains in North Carolina, and Color of Education partnership was born. In 2020, the Center for Child and Family Policy at Sanford replaced Policy Bridge as a Color of Education partner organization.