Black student achievement doesn’t look any better 10 years after a federal court ended its oversight of Dallas ISD’s desegregation plan
U.S. District Judge Barefoot Sanders kept watch over Dallas ISD for more than three decades under a desegregation court order that controlled where schools were located, attendance zones, education programs, staffing policies and much more.
This summer marks a decade since DISD went to court and convinced Sanders to dissolve the court order and end federal oversight. So, we ask the question: What has changed in the last 10 years? Are black students better off or worse off than they were under the court order, which lasted from 1971 to June 2003?
The answer is murky, but it’s clear that federal court efforts to desegregate DISD amount to a failed social experiment. The goal was to dismantle the district’s dual system for whites and blacks and create an integrated educational system. Legally, that happened. But what’s legal and what really happened were two different things.
White families rebelled and moved to the suburbs or put their kids in private schools. In 1970, more than 60 percent of DISD students were white. Now, 43 years later, Allen and Frisco ISDs look like DISD in