How can we desegregate re-segregated public schools? (again)
Richards, M., Stroub, K., Vasquez Heilig, J. & Volonnino, M. (2012). Achieving diversity in the Parents Involved era: Evidence for geographic integration plans in metropolitan school districts. Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy, 14(1), 65-94.
Landmark legal victories over de jure segregation in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka[1] helped to secure dramatic decreases in the racial and ethnic segregation of schools in subsequent decades, especially in the formerly segregated American South[2]. The promise of the post-Brown era proved ephemeral, however; nearly sixty years after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was inherently unequal, American schools remain remarkably segregated by race and ethnicity.[3] Since the 1980s, the de facto segregation of schools has rapidly intensified, especially in the South and for Hispanic/Latino populations.[4] Indeed, during the 1990s the proportion of Black students in majority-White schools decreased 13 percentage points, to a level not seen since 1970.[5] This re-segregation of schools has been facilitated by weak executive enforcement of civil rights provisions and continued judicial retrenchment on school integration, exemplified by Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell[6] and Freeman v. Pitts,[7] which diminished desegregation standards and resulted in the release of hundreds of districts from their court-imposed desegregation orders.
In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1[8] dealt another blow to integration efforts, rendering unconstitutional school assignment plans that use individual student race or ethnicity as the sole factor in school assignment, punctuating the steady decline in support for school
