Becoming Less Separate?: School Desegregation, Justice Department, and the Pursuit of Unitary Status

"The purpose of this report is to examine the effect that this increase in the number of school districts obtaining unitary status has had on the racial balance of schools that were previously under court order. In other words, do school districts tend to revert to racial clustering—as some would say, do they “resegregate”—after they are released from judicial supervision? Justice Stephen Breyer recently raised this very issue, when he claimed that many school districts are maintaining or extending their integration efforts because they fear what Justice Breyer calls “the evident risk of a return to school systems that are in fact (though not in law) resegregated . . . .”1 Justice Breyer’s argument implicitly raises an important question, which this report attempts to answer: Does judicial supervision appear, in the aggregate, to maintain racial integration and does that integration tend to erode as court orders are lifted?" Source: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

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