In this paper the compatibility of education and school desegregation are examined. The history of mass education in the United States is described as one of conflict over the meaning of integration. Desegregation is said to constitute a challenge to the assimilative logic of public education, charging the schools with accountability for integrating those who have not been assimilated. As such, forced integration is seen as challenging the major social control mechanism of public schooling. In order to demonstrate the incompatibility between desegregation and public education, an investigation was conducted in a desegregated Memphis high school. Using ethnographic data on the administrative, academic and student subsystems in the school, it is shown that student stratification and resegregation persisted in the newly integrated school. This phenomenon and the types of problems emerging from the desegregation process are offered as proof that goals of desegregation may be incompatible with the goals of the American public educational system as they are now defined. (Author/GC)