https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/us/louisiana-republicans-last-vestiges-school-desegregation.html
Republican leaders in Louisiana are pushing to end the last remnants of federally ordered school desegregation in their state, arguing that the era of racial exclusion is in the past and that the U.S. government has forced burdensome requirements on school districts long enough.

They may have found allies in the Trump administration, as it seeks to slash federal bureaucracy and roll back diversity efforts across the country.

It has been 71 years since the Supreme Court made racially segregated schools illegal in its landmark 1954 ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. Louisiana officials say that federal orders forcing school districts to comply with the decision are outdated and no longer needed, and that the country needs to move on.

Civil rights advocates see the effort as part of a broader attack on Black students and civil rights under the Trump administration, at a time when U.S. schools are only growing more segregated.

Nationally, more than 300 desegregation orders are estimated to still be on the books from the 1960s and 1970s, when school districts resistant to integration were put under the supervision of federal courts. In the decades since, many orders have gone dormant, with little federal enforcement.

In Louisiana, one of several Southern states with the bulk of remaining orders, the attorney general, with the support of the governor, is reviewing orders statewide and has vowed to work with school districts to “officially put the past in the past.”

The Justice Department has already dismissed one order, in a district south of New Orleans, that it said was left open by mistake. Federal officials are open to lifting others.

“I don’t think it serves the interest of justice to have ancient consent decrees out there,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general over civil rights under President Trump, who said her office would consider requests for dismissal on a case-by-case basis.

“It is 2025,” Ms. Dhillon said. “I haven’t heard a recent claim that there is government mandated segregation happening in 2025 in a school district.” She added: “If it’s happening, it’s wrong.”

The Supreme Court has said that school desegregation orders were meant to be temporary, and over the years, many have been lifted, usually after a district showed it had made efforts to desegregate.

Civil rights advocates fear any rollback of desegregation orders would harm Black students, at a moment when the Trump administration has been campaigning against programs meant to help them, including diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

The administration is invoking Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin and which has historically been used to protect minority groups, to threaten and investigate school districts with certain D.E.I. policies.

President Trump also issued new guidance on school discipline, instructing schools to look at behavior alone, without taking into account racial disparities in punishment. He has ordered the federal government more broadly to stop considering “disparate impact,” which is when a seemingly race-neutral policy has different outcomes for different demographic groups.

“You have an administration that denies the past and wants to tell a singular story about America and this country that erases this racial inequality,” said Janel George, an associate law professor at Georgetown, who focuses on racial equity in education.

In many cases, school districts are still under federal oversight because they never proved that they desegregated, said GeDá Jones Herbert, chief legal counsel for Brown’s Promise, a group that supports school integration. An open desegregation order is a legal tool for students to take a district back to court “and say, ‘hey they are still not doing what they need to do,’” she added.

Decades of research have shown that racially integrated schools improve academic and life outcomes for Black students, with no measurable harm to white students. That is largely because integration allows students of color to share in resources that white students already have.

Liz Murrill, the Louisiana attorney general, argued the answer is not to keep school desegregation orders open for decades. She said many orders in her state had been dormant for 30 or 40 years, and others had racked up expensive legal bills for school districts.

If a district is engaging in discriminatory practices today, she said, “you file a new lawsuit for a new problem.”

In what Louisiana officials hope will be the first of many dismissals, the Trump administration lifted a desegregation order in Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, last month, addressing what it called a “historical wrong.”

In that case, court records show, a judge ruled that the district had sufficiently desegregated in 1975, but the case remained open.

Shaheena Simons, who oversaw desegregation cases at the Department of Justice for nine years before resigning in April, disputed that the case had been left open by mistake. She said the Justice Department “monitors these cases and works with districts until they can show they have fully desegregated.”

The dismissal came as a relief to school officials, who had recently been dealing with reams of federal paperwork on everything from the number of Advanced Placement classes at each school to the racial makeup of athletic clubs, said Shelley Ritz, the superintendent. “It was binders on top of binders,” she said.

That doesn’t mean there still isn’t important work to do, Dr. Ritz said.

Plaquemines Parish in many ways exemplifies the lingering debates around school desegregation, whether the country has done enough to remedy the harms of the past and how much schools should be held responsible for factors outside of their direct control.

The Justice Department took the Plaquemines Parish school district to court in 1966, a time when Leander Perez, a prominent segregationist, ruled the region. He was a towering political figure who opposed the integration of Ruby Bridges and other Black students in New Orleans and helped open all-white private academies in Plaquemines Parish.

His legacy lives on in infamy in a communal history that has been passed down over generations, said Dione Griffin-Cossé, 56, who attended an all-Black school in Plaquemines Parish in the 1970s and ’80s and still lives in the area.

Still, the news of the order’s end surprised her and some others, who said they thought the time of desegregation had already passed. “To me, that’s long gone,” she said.

Today, the Plaquemines Parish school district is racially mixed, with a student body that is about 50 percent white, 25 percent Black, 12 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Asian. Many of the individual schools are themselves relatively diverse. But the bulk of white students attend schools on the north side, in a more populated area close to New Orleans.

That is largely the result of housing patterns, Dr. Ritz said.

Plaquemines Parish lies at the tip of Louisiana’s boot, in an area prone to flooding. The southern part of the district is at especially high risk. There, families are poorer, and students are largely Black or Hispanic.

Across the country, Black and Hispanic students are most likely to attend high poverty schools, which research shows is a driving factor in the country’s wide gaps in academic achievement. That’s also the case in Plaquemines Parish, which ranks among the best in the state for student growth and achievement, but where students in the southern end of the district still post lower test scores.

Dr. Ritz pointed to a number of investments the district had made to help attract qualified teachers to lower-income schools on the southern end. That includes opening day care centers for the children of employees and subsidizing apartments for teachers. “We are truly committed to every student in Plaquemines,” Dr. Ritz said.

The Supreme Court endorsed the idea that schools should not be on the hook for housing segregation in a series of rulings dating to the 1970s that set off a gradual unwinding of desegregation efforts across the country.

In 1974, during a period of fierce public pushback to the busing of students, the Supreme Court made its first major turn away from mandated integration.

The case involved a plan to integrate students from Detroit, which was majority Black, with its surrounding suburbs, which were predominantly white. The court ruled that schools did not have to desegregate across district lines, even if the result was segregation.

The case would limit efforts to integrate outside of the South, where desegregation occurred at schools within individual districts.

Then in 1991, the court ruled that districts already under federal court order could be released if they had addressed segregation “as far as practicable,” though segregation may still remain as a result of private residential choices.

The new efforts to roll back remaining desegregation orders may simply signal the official end of a movement that peaked long ago.

U.S. schools have only grown more segregated in recent decades, in part because of the lifting of desegregation orders, but also because of the rise of charter schools, according to research by professors Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California.

Today, schools are more segregated than they were in the late 1980s.

“The country has just sort of decided that segregation is not a problem that it wants to focus on,” Dr. Reardon said.

>>1406551 (OP)
honestly sounds fair. New Jersey and nyc schools are both more segregated than Louisiana
>inb4 some faggot tries to argue this again and I have to waste time looking up the lawsuits against nyc and NJ or some fag says it's not intentional, it's just a product of how school districts and the science high schools work, even though in both cases it was 100% intentional because white people in nyc and NJ dont want to send their kids to integrated schools

>>1406608
nobody cares about the explanation of your script, shill

>>1406608
You just know the NAACP is going to make a shitshow out of this for the next 10 years.

>>1406609
you seem pretty mad, shill boy
>>1406613
which is funny because the NAACP kept suing nyc and nyc kept telling them to eat shit

>>1406635
make sure to throw away the piss bottles in your room at some point ok

very strange how Democrats shills have admitted to intentionally spamming and shitting up threads to derail them but the jannies dont do anything about that? very odd

>>1406651
being a whiny faggot when you get called out for spamming lies just makes you look more pathetic, esl shill

>>1406652
To be fair, I mostly see Dems/leftists spreading lies and being ridiculous children on this board.
I think they (You) do it to keep shit threads bumped though. Because the alternative is like negative IQ points.

>>1406608

30% of public school teachers send _their_ kids to private schools, which they can afford to do as they have well paid union jobs with top of the line health care and pensions.

>>1406722
That percentage varies greatly between cities and regions, and is only that high in places where republicans have already gutted the state education system.

>>1406551 (OP)
as somone in the south it really should be put in the past because its been so long that any actual intential segration has long since been worn thin.

>retards still justifying forced bussing in 2025
bussing means children ride the bus for am extra hour or two to go to a more distant (not better) public school because of racial quotas. It was immoral then and still immoral.

>>1406551 (OP)
Meanwhile, leftist schools in Illinois want to bring back segregation:
https://thepostmillennial.com/chicago-area-high-school-provides-segregated-classes-for-black-and-hispanic-students

>Across the country, Black and Hispanic students are most likely to attend high poverty schools, which research shows is a driving factor in the country’s wide gaps in academic achievement.
except it's not actually. Schools in poor neighborhoods are well-funded. The actual problem is that the kids are coming from broken homes because Black women think there's nothing wrong with being a single mother. Stop bitching about racism and poverty and just tell Black women to find a husband before she has children.
And raise your kids right, the behavioral differences between Black and White students are huge.
>>1406724
>state education system
schools are largely funded at the district level. And it's the Democrat districts like Baltimore that nobody wants to send their kids to public school.
>but muh poverty
Baltimore is one of the best-funded school districts in the country:
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-spending-per-student-2022-enrollment-performance-kirwan-new-york-boston-washington

>>1406652
>>1406705
the issue is the dem shills are paid to post orange man bad stuff and promote general communism, but they arent very smart so they always get btfo'd and humiliated so they resort to either bot posts or spamming insults to try to detail the thread because they just cant compete in a debate

>>1406731
>not better
It objectively was better for the minority kids, which was the point. Part of forced bussing meant there was an incentive for white power structures to spread resources around more fairly, not to mention disincentivize dicking over redlined areas as much since white kids would then get caught in the crossfire.

Also growing up in a segregated environment is not actually good for kids.

>>1406749
>>1406731
Oh, also, networking is incredibly important for a person's future (that's part of why zip code is so predictive of life outcomes)

Giving minority students from poor neighborhoods opportunities to form relationships with people with generational wealth is functionally a lifeline.

>>1406736
the issue is >>1406736 posts , but isn't very smart so she always get btfo'd and humiliated so she resorts to bot posts and spamming insults while accusing others of doing the same, projecting because she's a hypocrite

>>1406736
>the issue is the dem shills are paid to post orange man bad stuff and promote general communism, but they arent very smart so they always get btfo'd and humiliated so they resort to either bot posts or spamming insults to try to detail the thread because they just cant compete in a debate
100000000%

>>1406736
>>1406752
Get a room you two

>>1406749
>It objectively was better for the minority kids, which was the point.
No it wasn't. Their test scores didn't improve

>>1406750
IQ is more predictive of life outcomes than zip code

>Giving minority students from poor neighborhoods opportunities to form relationships with people with generational wealth is functionally a lifeline.
I will make a guess and say there is no evidence this works

>>1406762
>IQ is more predictive of life outcomes than zip code
Zip code is predictive of iq too.

>>1406749
>>1406750
gunna need sources on all this along with data showing how much it hurt white kids
>>1406751
yeah you are mad as fuck because you keep getting humiliated

>>1406751
look, he just proved your point for you

George Wallace was right about everything.

>>1406850
you're not even white or american

>>1406835
nice samefag, tranny

>>1406856
and your fetish doesn't belong on this nsfw board

>>1406858
you mean sfw board, not nsfw. /gif/ is nsfw and it's 90% trannies. plus the janny for /news/ is a literal tranny because he is also the janny for /lgbt/, aka your home board

>>1406860
you're so vulgar of a shill that it is de facto a nsfw board. but your fetish still doesn't belong

>>1406860
>/gif/ is nsfw and it's 90% trannies
and you're here on 4chan which includes /lgbt/ too, or you wouldn't be here. The fact you need to be on a board which includes that which you constantly mention, yet claim you 'hate', says so much about you. your need to project
>>>/lgbt/
you need to go back there, obsessive fetishist who accuses others of being the same.

>>1406872
The irony is that poster is easily the source of 80% of the tranny mentions on this board, has started every thread about trannys.
They're the only threads they start where they always post the article, and back it up with a bunch of other links

>>1406732

Indeed, Detroit public school per capita student funding is higher than the surrounding suburbs, yet test scores and graduation rates are far below the burbs.

It's not about the money.

>>1406749
>It objectively was better for the minority kids, which was the point.

It was blatantly racist and anti-White, which was the actual point.

>>1406888
>Having to go on a school bus and see minorities is racist and anti-white

>>1406889
> LBJ's "Great Society" kicks in
> Blacks run rampant
> Whites move out
> pay school taxes out the ass
> their kids get shipped off to schools destroyed by Blacks
> welfare Blacks go to pristine White schools

Yeah, totally not racist...

>>1406952
cool revisionist history, gramps

>>1406872
botpost
>>1406873
samefaggot

>>1406968
They're talking about (You).

>>1406967

Read a book, zoomer.

>>1406952
Having minorities in your school and on your buses isn't anti-white you absolute moron.

>>1406551 (OP)
>image
Why are cuckservatives like this? They're so fragile.

>>1406979
Which book did you read that taught you the revisionist history?