K-12 VOLUNTARY INTEGRATION AS BROWN TURNS SEVENTY Open Access

Seventy years ago, Chief Justice Earl Warren authored a unanimous decision holding that public-school segregation was an unconstitutional violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.¹ Decades of community organizing, litigation, and political change were finally going to result in equitable opportunity for Black children, an achievement that later extended to other minoritized groups. While much progress has been made, new challenges have also emerged. There remain considerable segregation and minority group isolation in our nation’s schools.

Today, U.S. school districts are still trying to voluntarily take up this mantle and integrate their schools—a considerably different task from the legal and political efforts that require compliance with remedial desegregation. Like other race-conscious policies in education, these locally led efforts have encountered constraints due to changing understandings of what governmental bodies can do to address the persisting racial inequality and vestiges of racial discrimination. This article examines the current state of voluntary integration in the United States.

The seventy years between Brown v. Board of Education and today’s reality reflect a long history of struggles for civil rights and equity. Though Brown’s missive is admirable, the society we live in today has provided many forms of pushback against scholars’ and practitioners’ efforts to achieve true educational equity. We note ways in which efforts on the ground might provide avenues for progress in integration, as well as how the U.S. Supreme Court’s shifting jurisprudence chills efforts to advance our nation and to achieve the aspiration of Brown.

This article unfolds as follows. First, we review the history of K-12 desegregation efforts, including the political, legal, and organizing efforts to enforce compliance with Brown and subsequently a narrowing of race-conscious education policies with a goal of integrating schools and creating diverse educational institutions. Second, we review research about the extent of K-12 segregation over time and research about why integration matters. Both bodies of research have motivated considerations that have led local school boards to adopt voluntary integration policies. Next, we review state constitutional challenges to school segregation, including one state case using interdistrict, choice-based desegregation to remedy segregation. From there, we review findings from our research canvassing the extent of voluntary integration policies adopted by school boards. We explain what we can determine about the mechanisms used to integrate and the way in which diversity has been increasingly defined as not involving race. We then describe other specialized and diverse charter-school efforts that are part of a larger effort to employ strategies in K-12 education to try to reduce racial isolation.

As is well documented, the Brown v. Board of Education decision was the culmination of a long legal strategy to build evidence and political support while amassing legal victories to challenge the constitutionality of segregation in K-12 schooling.²Brown itself was the combination of four cases, each with different facts and histories of segregation: Topeka, Kansas;³ Clarendon County, South Carolina;⁴ Prince Edward County, Virginia;⁵ and New Castle County, Delaware.⁶ In the Delaware case, the judge declared that the facilities were not equal and ordered the immediate desegregation of students.⁷ In the other cases, the judges upheld school segregation as permissible, though in the South Carolina case, one dissenting judge argued segregation was unequal,⁸ and in the Kansas case, the presiding judge attached nine findings of fact that described social science evidence summarizing the harms of segregated schools.⁹ The cases were combined and argued twice before the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in 1954.¹⁰

In Brown, the Supreme Court held that segregated schools were inherently unequal. One rationale for the decision was that the importance of public education in the mid-1950s to prepare children for citizenship in our democracy was so vital that Black children attending segregated schools was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. The Court cited social science evidence to buttress this conclusion but overlooked social science that had demonstrated that segregated schools also harmed white children.¹¹ It also did not explain how the constitutional violation should be remedied, instead holding it over for argument the following term.

A year later, in a decision commonly known as Brown II,¹² the Court issued guidance about how to remedy segregation, which was either required or permitted in seventeen states at the time as well as in Washington, D.C.¹³ The Court held that desegregation should commence “with all deliberate speed” and should be returned to the local district court to oversee the process of fashioning a remedy. Significantly, given the resources required to bring a legal challenge—and the possibility of retaliation against those Black plaintiffs challenging segregation—the remedy was confined to the four cases at issue in Brown, not more broadly to all similarly situated communities with segregated schools.

At the same time, the decision resulted in massive political resistance in the South, including from white political leaders. In particular, not complying with desegregation became politically popular.¹⁴ Thus, the extent of desegregation was minimal in the first decade after Brown.¹⁵ The passage of federal legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965, along with federal enforcement helped to increase desegregation compliance in southern districts before the courts prompted further desegregation progress.¹⁶

In the late 1960s, the Supreme Court finally again took up the question of what desegregation meant, building upon decisions of the Fifth Circuit.¹⁷ In 1968, the Court ruled in Green v. County School Board that using a freedom-of-choice plan did not comply with what was required to desegregate because of the few students who had “chosen” to desegregate formerly segregated schools.¹⁸ The Court found that merely giving families the option to choose was an inadequate remedy and it overly burdened parents to remedy segregation despite Brown II placing the onus on districts. The decision also specified six factors that would be used to judge desegregation compliance: student assignment, faculty assignment, staff assignment, facilities, transportation, and extracurricular activities.¹⁹ A year later, the Court declared that the time for delay in desegregation compliance was over and emphasized the need for desegregation remedies to work “now.”²⁰ The Court again assessed a neighborhood schools assignment policy in a North Carolina county. In this case, the district’s neighborhood school policy had largely maintained school segregation. The Court, describing the interconnections between school and residential segregation, required that the district devise a new policy, including the use of tools like busing and pairing of noncontiguous zones to further desegregation.²¹ Finally, in the first decision outside the South, Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, the Court first extended desegregation to Latinx students and also declared the presumption that if one part of a district had segregated schools, the entire district was likely to be segregated.²²

The year following Keyes, however, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its first ruling since Brown limiting what desegregation required. In the decision, the Court overturned a cross-district plan ordered by lower courts to desegregate Detroit, which was majority Black.²³ The Court held that suburban districts should not be included in the urban district’s remedy. The decision meant that in many of the nation’s metropolitan areas outside the South, where there were often dozens (or more) of districts of varied racial composition within a few miles of one another, there were nearby districts that white families could go to in order to avoid the imposition of a desegregation remedy in an urban district. This limited the effectiveness of the plan being implemented.²⁴

After a spate of consequential school desegregation rulings from 1968 through 1974, the Court did not again return to the issue of school desegregation until 1990, when in a trio of early 1990s cases it reduced the remedial requirements for districts subject to court desegregation orders. In Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell, the Court held that school desegregation remedies should not extend in “perpetuity” but only to the extent practicable.²⁵ A year later, the Court further clarified that districts could be released piecemeal from desegregation orders if some but not all of the Green factors had been satisfied. In such cases, federal courts could grant partial unitary status and examine whether the district acted in good faith.²⁶ These cases, combined with a third decision in 1995,²⁷ resulted in hundreds of desegregation cases ending and was a factor in Black-white segregation increasing in the South.²⁸

During the 1980s and 1990s, lower federal courts decided some cases limiting race-conscious desegregation. In one, although the case settled before it reached the Supreme Court, the Third Circuit struck down race-conscious affirmative action policies that applied to teacher hiring policies that aimed to ensure faculties were racially diverse²⁹ (one of the Green factors for districts under remedial desegregation). Several school districts’ race-conscious admissions efforts were also under scrutiny, and some were held to be unconstitutional in their use of race during this period.³⁰

Race-conscious higher education efforts have steadily been narrowed over the last fifty years, beginning with Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which eliminated the remedial justification for such efforts.³¹ Instead, higher-education institutions sought to further compelling interests in diversity through admissions policies. In 2003, the Court’s decisions in Grutter v. Bollinger³² and Gratz v. Bollinger³³ affirmed a holistic, narrowly tailored law school admissions policy while striking down a race-conscious undergraduate admissions policy that was deemed to have a too mechanistic use of race.³⁴ In the following decade, the Court again considered how much deference to afford University of Texas-Austin in analyzing its race-conscious admissions policies.³⁵ The Court ultimately held that the university’s policies were permissible. In 2023, however, the Court held that the race-conscious admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) violated the Constitution, ending most considerations of race in higher-education admissions.³⁶

As described above, while the Supreme Court limited remedial desegregation and diversity efforts in higher education, it had not considered whether efforts to voluntarily integrate K-12 schools were constitutional. Some districts had entered “voluntary” agreements with the Office of Education in the 1960s to maintain eligibility for federal funding, but as most recently discussed, “voluntary integration” comprised efforts to create racially and/or economically diverse schools when districts were not required to do so. Districts’ efforts might apply to a handful of schools or the entire district.

As greater scrutiny came to higher-education admissions, legal challenges arose in K-12 contexts as well, although litigators had long tried to make the case that the mission of K-12 education differed from that of higher education. Most importantly, each state’s constitution provides a constitutional right to K-12 education and makes it compulsory for children of certain ages. Therefore, the interest in reducing racial isolation is distinct from the diversity interest that has been the basis of race-conscious policies in higher education since Bakke. Nevertheless, in 2006, the Court granted review to two K-12 voluntary integration cases from Seattle and Louisville.³⁷ The two districts’ challenged policies involved choice-based student assignment policies. In each, the district considered parental rankings of preferred schools alongside other district goals, including racial diversity, in ultimately deciding where to assign students to schools when there was more demand than available seats.³⁸ A key issue was that in some cases, the race or ethnicity of a student would be the determining factor in assigning a child to a school. In its fractured decision, the Court applied a strict-scrutiny framework to analyze the districts’ policies.³⁹ It held that the districts had identified two compelling interests for their voluntary integration policies but had not demonstrated that the policies were narrowly tailored.⁴⁰ In doing so, the Court believed that the harm to students and families who were denied their first-choice school because of their racial/ethnic status exceeded the benefit to the district’s interest in integrating its schools.

In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Kennedy described districts’ compelling interests and ways that districts could pursue the goals of voluntary integration and potentially not be subjected to strict-scrutiny analysis.⁴¹ For example, he found that districts could use race in a generalized way, such as considering the racial composition of an area, as they might in drawing attendance-zone boundaries; he also noted that policies with the goal of reducing racial isolation would be pursuing a permissible goal. In Justice Breyer’s dissent, joined by three colleagues, he identified a range of justifications for the use of integration policies. Thus, together there were five Justices who believed that voluntary integration policies were permissible, albeit in modified ways as compared to the policies employed by Louisville and Seattle.

While legally permissible avenues to voluntarily integrating schools remained, the law had been narrowed, and the Parents Involved decision was lengthy and fractured, which led to considerable ambiguity on the ground. It took more than a year for the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to offer guidance to school districts; this guidance took a very restrictive perspective on the decision, recommending only the use of socioeconomic plans, for example.⁴² In the first year after the decision, several districts discontinued voluntary integration efforts, in part because of a threat of legal action.⁴³ In 2011, the Obama Administration repealed the initial post-Parents Involved “Dear Colleague Letter”⁴⁴ and replaced it with fairly extensive guidance outlining the compelling reasons for voluntary integration policies, race-conscious and race-neutral assignment methods, and a decision-making process that districts could use to comply with the law.⁴⁵ This guidance was rescinded in July 2018 and replaced by the 2008 “Dear Colleague Letter.” In 2021, the Biden Administration once again changed the executive branch’s guidance on this topic, noting that the 2008 and 2011 guidance documents were under review.⁴⁶ Despite the legal uncertainty, lower courts did affirm that race-conscious policies were permissible, notably including the Third Circuit’s decision in a school rezoning case.⁴⁷ However, more broadly, Parents Involved has made it more difficult for locally elected leaders who want to pursue integration to navigate what remains permissible, what risks districts are willing to take on, what will be effective, and what will retain the support of district voters. This is particularly important because emerging research suggests that policies that use socioeconomic status instead of race are less effective in racially desegregating schools.⁴⁸

Most recently, in June 2023, the Supreme Court once again limited race-conscious policies that aimed to broaden access in education when it declared that Harvard’s and UNC’s race-conscious admissions policies were impermissible.⁴⁹ Though the majority opinion did not directly invoke K-12 education, it may have a chilling effect on districts’ race-conscious integration efforts.⁵⁰ Additionally, in Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence, he noted that desegregation efforts after Brown were not supposed to last indefinitely.⁵¹

The public school enrollment is more racially diverse than ever before, and it has shifted substantially since the time of the Brown decision. In the mid-1950s, between 80% and 90% of students were white.⁵² Most of the other students at that time were African American. Hispanic students weren’t counted in federal enrollment data until 1970, but they have risen to become the largest group of students of color today (28%), while white students are less than 50% of the public school enrollment today.⁵³ Black students are a larger part of the enrollment today than in the mid-1950s (approximately 15%), and another 10% of the total enrollment are Asian (6%) and multiracial (4%) students.⁵⁴

Taken together, these demographic changes represent a vast transformation of the public school enrollment, with many more students of color since Brown was decided. Historically, in the years after Brown, desegregation focused on desegregating Black and white students, particularly reducing racial isolation for Black students, who were the focus of the cases in Brown. In 1973, as mentioned, Latinx students’ rights to desegregation was affirmed, though they were still a relatively small group: in 1980, they were half as numerous as Black public school students.⁵⁵ However, by the early 2000s, the two largest regions of the country, the West and the South, had public school enrollments where white students were a minority.⁵⁶ In the South—the region with the largest concentration of Black students—Latinx enrollment surpassed Black enrollment around 2010. Multiracial children in the under-18 population are rising sharply as well, after federal racial classifications changed in 2000 and measuring of these groups began.⁵⁷ Demographic changes also make addressing school segregation more complex, as questions of what constitutes integration arise. As a result, integration is typically measured in several ways, often including standard measures such as exposure to white students,⁵⁸ but also the extent to which students of all races/ethnicities are in schools with students of other racial/ethnic groups.

The Brown decision had a limited effect on desegregating southern schools for the first decade after it was issued. In a handful of southern states, there was no desegregation of any K-12 students until 1963.⁵⁹ In 1964, 2% of southern Black students attended majority-white schools.⁶⁰ A combination of pressure from the coordination of the federal government’s branches—judicial opinions increasingly requiring districts to make some efforts, Congress passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act⁶¹ and expanding education funding a year later, and executive enforcement of compliance with desegregation (at risk of jeopardizing federal funding)—helped to rapidly increase desegregation in the South.⁶² By 1970, 33.1% of Black students were in majority-white schools.⁶³ Moreover, the percentage of Black students in concentrated minority schools, or schools where less than 10% of students were white, declined substantially in the South. In fact, among all regions of the country, southern Black students experienced lower levels of segregated schools than their peers elsewhere.⁶⁴

Segregation declined for Black students through the late 1980s, until it began to rise again. Indeed, research has documented a causal link between the segregation of Black students in the South and the end of court desegregation orders, which were hastened by the 1990s’ Supreme Court decisions.⁶⁵ The percentage of Latinx students in segregated schools has also been gradually increasing.⁶⁶ The shares of Black and Latinx students in racially concentrated minority schools were 40.1% and 41.6%, respectively—higher than they had been since the late 1960s.⁶⁷ And, although white student segregation has been declining, white students also have had high levels of segregation from students of other races. For example, the typical white student in 2016–2017 attended a public school that was nearly 70% white—and just 30% were students of color—while Black students attended schools with less than 50% of students of their race, on average.⁶⁸ The recent Government Accountability Office report found that 45% of all white students in the United States attend a school in which 75% of the students are of their race.⁶⁹ By comparison, just 23% of Black students attended schools with 75% or more Black students, and 31% of Latinx students experienced similar levels of concentration.⁷⁰ What is notable here is that at a time in which the students-of-color population is larger and more diverse (e.g., with more groups), these findings illustrate that Black and Latinx students have high levels of isolation with their own race too. They have relatively low exposure to white students, but they also have low exposure to other minoritized student groups, meaning that they do not experience much intergroup contact or the benefits that can result from such contact. And approximately 60% of Black and Latinx students attend schools with 75% or more students of color, whereas only 6% of white students do.⁷¹

A consistent finding in studies of school segregation has been the overlap between concentrations of Black and/or Hispanic students and concentrations of low-income students. For example, the GAO analysis found that 80% of schools that had fewer than 25% of students who were white or Asian had at least 75% of students who were low-income. Even in suburban schools, which are more affluent than urban schools, this same pattern applies: white students attended schools that, on average, had 30% low-income students while Black and Latinx students’ schools, on average, had 60% low-income students.⁷²

As a result of Milliken v. Bradley,⁷³ virtually all remedial desegregation efforts have focused on within-district segregation.⁷⁴ Yet, school district boundaries are a contributing factor to persisting segregation as well. One analysis found that segregation between school districts was the cause of two-thirds of all segregation,⁷⁵ although this varies considerably based on the region of the country and the size of school districts. New research finds that especially in large districts, school racial segregation has been increasing for the last several decades.⁷⁶ Other researchers have also pointed to differences across district boundaries as being racially unequal.⁷⁷ School districts can emerge when communities secede from more heterogenous districts; this raises a concern that district boundary lines are less permeable and so ingrain racial and economic segregation between districts. If they had remained as one district, more diverse groups of students would be available to a district seeking to integrate.⁷⁸ A handful of voluntary interdistrict desegregation programs have aimed to address district-level segregation, although such programs can be hard to sustain.⁷⁹

Ironically, despite the rising segregation, we know more about how students benefit from integrated schools and how school segregation can limit opportunities for Black and Latinx students.

The research about the benefits of diverse schools and harms of segregated schools continues to inform why districts would choose to voluntarily integrate their schools. Such evidence has been important when voluntary efforts are legally challenged. This evidence has also informed local decision-making when school boards and district administrators consider student assignment policies with the goal of voluntary integration. For example, they rely on research that illustrates how increasing school diversity can help them attain a broad array of educational goals.

The research consensus on school segregation finds that racially segregated minoritized schools have fewer educational resources that are linked to higher student outcomes. Predominantly minoritized districts have lower funding.⁸⁰ At the school level, those with higher concentrations of Black and Latinx students are less likely to have qualified, experienced teachers and stable faculties or advanced curricular offerings.⁸¹ Relatedly, student outcomes, such as educational attainment, are worse in such schools.⁸² Recent work has even shown that Black students attending desegregated schools have a range of better outcomes across their life course compared to peers attending segregated schools; such benefits also extend, in turn, to their children and grandchildren.⁸³

The benefits of diverse schools for students of color as well as white students has also been an important justification for voluntary integration. In his dissent in Parents Involved, Justice Breyer wrote,

Social science research finds that diverse schools are associated with more cross-racial friendships, lower prejudice formation, and a higher likelihood of living and working in more integrated spaces as adults.⁸⁵

Recent research finds that benefits extend to students who cross district boundaries as part of voluntary integration programs. One study of the Boston area interdistrict desegregation program found that participants from Boston who enroll in suburban districts are more likely than peers not participating to graduate from high school and enroll in four-year universities.⁸⁶ A separate study found that despite some of the logistical challenges of Boston students getting to their suburban schools, they had a range of improved outcomes: higher test scores, lower exclusionary discipline,⁸⁷ higher daily attendance, and a greater likelihood of graduating high school on time.⁸⁸ This study also found higher rates of enrollment and graduation from four-year colleges as well as increased employment and salary through young adulthood.⁸⁹ Notably, these findings hold regardless of which of the thirty-three suburban districts the students attended. The outcomes of suburban students were not affected.

Following Brown, most legal efforts to further remedial desegregation and challenge voluntary integration have been in federal courts. However, given some of the constraints of federal court decisions, advocates have also considered the state courts as a means to achieve integration. Indeed, some state court efforts also hold promise for pursuing alternative means to achieve Brown’s promise. Such cases rely on state constitutions, each of which guarantees a right to education (unlike the Federal Constitution), and the fact that the state establishes school districts as administrative means to carry out this constitutional responsibility. Although using state constitutions to advance educational equity has had mixed success, challenges to segregation across district boundary lines in some states have been an area of recent focus given the empirical evidence showing that a substantial contributing factor to school segregation is segregation across boundary lines.

In December 2023, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued an opinion in a challenge to school segregation filed in 2015 by parents of students in St. Paul and Minneapolis school districts.⁹⁰ Earlier settlement agreements for a voluntary integration remedy were not approved by the state legislature. The decision held that the plaintiffs do not have to show intentional segregation or that the state caused segregation but instead only needed to show that existing school segregation (e.g., de facto) substantially influences the inadequate education they received. The court remanded the case to the district court for its assessment. The chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court dissented, believing the plaintiffs did not need to prove harm. Her opinion noted that segregation makes it hard to achieve “an essential goal of an adequate education …—[that] children must learn to respect and live with one another in multi-racial and multi-cultural communities.”⁹¹

In fall 2023, the New Jersey Superior Court held that the State was responsible for the “unlawful, persistent, and pervasive” school segregation existing in New Jersey. The litigation began in 2018 with plaintiffs challenging existing segregation that resulted from school district boundaries and charter schools. Plaintiffs alleged that many students in New Jersey did not receive the benefits of attending diverse schools because of the State’s policies. The opinion noted that the State had also failed to take steps to remedy the existing segregation. However, the opinion also found that the plaintiffs had not demonstrated that the entire school system was segregated across all districts in New Jersey. According to media reports, the parties are now engaged in a mediation process to try to resolve the case.⁹²

Finally, the first successful legal challenge to segregation in state court occurred in 1996, when the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in Sheff v. O’Neill⁹³ that Connecticut’s school segregation was impermissible. Since then, the State and the plaintiffs have negotiated a series of settlements to remedy Hartford-region segregation. In the most recent stipulation, the state of Connecticut agreed to meet the demand of nearly all Hartford resident students who apply for any of the integrated school options that are part of the Sheff remedy: the city–suburban desegregation transfer program that permits Hartford residents to apply for seats in majority-white suburban districts or one of several dozen interdistrict magnet schools.⁹⁴ Moreover, an analysis of segregation in Connecticut credited the Sheff programs that facilitate students crossing district boundaries with being a reason that schools were not as segregated as the students’ neighborhoods were.⁹⁵ These programs enroll approximately 20,000 students from the region every year—the largest interdistrict desegregation program currently operating.⁹⁶

We now turn to examining how, in this legal and political context, and informed by social science research, school districts are choosing—if at all—to voluntarily implement any type of integration policy. Because of the legal risk that any educational diversity policy may encounter, we believe it is likely that more districts employ such policies, but they may do so in a way that is difficult for outside researchers or advocates to identify. Because of this risk, we do not identify some of the examples we describe below.

Through our research, we have identified 82 districts engaged in some type of voluntary integration. We began with a list of approximately 120 school districts based on the reports made by the Century Foundation, research from the Center for Education and Civil Rights at Penn State, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Magnet School Assistance Program (MSAP) grant winners.⁹⁷ Through our analysis, the number of districts classified as engaging in voluntary integration was reduced to 82 from the original 120 districts for several reasons. First, we have excluded charter schools, selective or criteria schools, and interdistrict schools from our overall count because we wanted to focus on school districts that have made decisions that could be replicated elsewhere. Additionally, districts that use traditional integration methods for a non-integrative purpose—such as adjusting attendance zone boundaries to combat overcrowding—were removed. We also excluded districts that stated that integration was a priority but where there was no evidence of the implementation of integration efforts. Our final list includes 82 districts that use evidence-based integration practices to increase socioeconomic and/or racial integration in their schools.

The eighty-two districts that we determined were engaging in voluntary integration span twenty-nine U.S. states. Although not all schools in a district may be subject to the district’s voluntary integration policy, we find that the districts that have some type of voluntary policy collectively enrolled more than 4.3 million students in 2021, according to data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics. This represents slightly less than 10% of all public school students in the United States. These districts enroll a disproportionately larger share of students of color (see table 1).

The racial composition of the United States and schools themselves has changed, which has impacted the United States’ view of integration alongside changing case law. In the age of Brown, Black and white student integration was the priority because the vast majority of students were white or Black. In 1970, white students’ public school enrollment dominated at 79%, while 15% of students were Black and 5% were Hispanic.⁹⁸ As of 2021, 45% of public school students in elementary and secondary schools are white, while 28.5% are Hispanic and 14.9% are Black.⁹⁹

In today’s voluntarily integrating districts, Hispanic students constitute the largest population of students—with 1.75 million students—followed by white students at 1.15 million. Those two subgroups alone make up more than half of the total student population in these districts. As white enrollment decreases and Hispanic enrollment increases, voluntarily integrating schools must consider how to integrate Hispanic populations alongside Black and white students to better reflect the diversity of their surrounding communities and enhance the academic experience their students receive. This is evidenced by several MSAP grant winners specifically using their funds to integrate their Hispanic students in the district (e.g., Victoria Independent School District; New York City Community School District #4).

These districts use four main mechanisms of voluntary integration.¹⁰¹ Notably, these methods have moved away from many of the mandatory reassignment tools used to comply with Brown—instead often using choice with civil rights safeguards to integrate. Districts may also combine mechanisms and may use attendance zones and magnet schools, for example.

Among voluntarily integrating districts, magnet school programs were the most popular vehicle of integration due in part to the U.S. Department of Education’s promotion and financial support of these programs for reducing racial isolation and increasing diversity in schools.¹⁰² The Magnet School Assistance Program has been the primary funding for school integration since the 1980s, and it also offers technical assistance tools for districts regardless of whether they have received funding.¹⁰³ We have identified thirty-three school districts that use magnet schools as a method of voluntary integration. Magnet programs have several uses for integration: overall, they focus on enrolling a diverse class of students through their lottery system, which gives weight to some diversity criteria. Additionally, magnet programs can pull underrepresented students into schools that may receive federal or other funding for unique or advanced educational opportunities like S.T.E.M. learning—opportunities that they may have historically had less access to.

Schools implementing this practice include Albuquerque Public Schools, where the district has received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education to implement the magnet school program with requirements for using the school as a mechanism of desegregation. Eligibility for the grant requires that schools make a specific commitment to providing an equitable, integrated education to students in their district and to reducing minority group isolation through school creation. This could include using the funding to create a school that focuses on increasing women’s and racial minorities’ access to S.T.E.M. courses or simply having specific criteria for selecting students to ensure that the school is racially integrated.¹⁰⁴ Districts must also demonstrate a need for the resources and have a detailed plan that includes outreach and annual desegregation goals.¹⁰⁵

Alternatively, a magnet school integration program can reflect a district like Charleston County School District, where the district has set its own parameters for creating an integrated school district. Charleston County reserves seats in the magnet schools for qualified student applicants whose neighborhood or assigned school has a poverty index of 80% or higher.¹⁰⁶

Attendance zone boundaries are the second-most-used student assignment method for voluntary integration districts. Twenty-nine of the eighty-two districts use attendance zone boundaries¹⁰⁷ with a specific focus on integrating their schools. Attendance boundary plans can be helpful for present and future integration, as boundaries can be shifted and changed as the composition of neighborhoods changes over the years. Also, unlike magnet schools, which typically affect only a small percentage of students, attendance zone boundaries can be designed to integrate all schools in a district. Usually, a district employing this technique will assess the composition of its entire community, examining whether there is racial clustering in neighborhoods or households of similar socioeconomic statuses live in similar places. Districts seeking to integrate can draw their school zone boundary lines through these neighborhoods to assign them to multiple schools instead of concentrating them in one or a few.

An example of a district employing this technique is the Chicago Public Schools. This district uses a written policy for its attendance zones that specifies the zones that will be employed for the purpose of actively desegregating the district’s schools and minimizing “transportation burdens.”¹⁰⁸ Chicago Public Schools and other districts using attendance zones for integrative purposes often include in their policy that they reserve the right to revise the attendance zone boundaries.¹⁰⁹ This allows for the schools to remain desegregated even if a neighborhood’s racial or socioeconomic compositions change. Such changes, however, can be contentious, which may cause school boards to adopt plans that are not as completely integrative as possible due to community response.¹¹⁰

We classified twenty-one districts that have integration-focused controlled-choice policies. Controlled-choice policies allow families to have input on where children attend schools in the district. Parents rank their preferred schools, and the district considers these choices alongside diversity considerations in ultimately making students’ school assignments. These policies, like attendance zones, typically apply to all schools in a district in a given grade level (e.g., all elementary schools), making them more comprehensive in nature than others that apply to a small percentage of students or schools.

Districts implementing controlled choice could look something like Berkeley Unified School District, which states that it will consider different criteria, including parental education level, parent income level, and race and ethnicity of a small micro-neighborhood where a student lives, to determine which school a student is placed in.¹¹¹ The goal is to ensure that each school brings in a racially and economically diverse class of students. In this district, controlled-choice student assignment was recently extended from elementary schools to include the district’s middle schools.

Last, twelve of these eighty-two districts use transfer policies—policies in which students can transfer to different schools in the district under certain circumstances. We consider transfer policies to be voluntary integration if the policy criteria include increasing socioeconomic or racial diversity at the school to which the student would be transferring. These integration policies are less likely to have a widespread impact given that they require families to know about the existence of such policies, submit a transfer request by the deadline, and potentially provide transportation to an out-of-neighborhood school. These policies might make modest improvements to overall segregation but alone will likely not result in substantial change.

A consequence of Parents Involved and other legal decisions¹¹² is that school districts are much more likely to measure integration in terms of socioeconomic characteristics rather than racial composition. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College¹¹³ may further contribute to a continuation of this trend. In earlier studies of voluntary integration, more districts were clearly using race as part of their overall diversity measure.¹¹⁴

Of schools that were integrated through a magnet program, at least twenty-three did so along socioeconomic lines.¹¹⁵ When using magnet schools for integration, the districts we have identified typically used a student’s free- or reduced-lunch status or their family’s socioeconomic status as data points. By collecting data on a student’s socioeconomic status in their magnet school application, schools can admit a class of students that meets the district’s goal to reflect the diverse composition of their area.

Among the twenty-nine districts that employ attendance zone boundaries as their method of integration, the socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods and children’s free- or reduced-lunch status are the primary data sources that districts use to draw attendance boundaries through neighborhoods that will increase schools’ diversity. At least twenty-six districts rely on a student’s socioeconomic status to draw their boundary plans. Notably, Justice Kennedy’s concurrence explicitly stated that drawing attendance zones by taking into account racial composition of neighborhoods was permissible and would not invoke strict scrutiny, but it is not clear whether many districts are exploring this as a potential student assignment method.

Integration through controlled choice is similar to magnet school integration in that districts’ applications may include questions that allow districts to characterize a student by the diversity metrics they have adopted. At least sixteen districts use a student’s socioeconomic status as the diversity criterion. Berkeley Unified School District’s plan, mentioned above, is one that does consider race alongside socioeconomic characteristics—however, it measures these characteristics by the composition of the small “planning area” in which a student lives, not by the student or family individually.

Lastly, for integration policies that use student transfer, it is not uncommon for a district to consider a student’s neighborhood as the transfer criterion. At least eight districts using transfer integration do so by considering a student’s socioeconomic status or the socioeconomic status of their neighborhood.

In reviewing districts that might be using some type of voluntary integration policy, we created a separate category for districts with integration goals that were “aspirational with a lack of evidence.” These districts had some type of stated commitment about integration being an important goal, but their district policies, parent information documents, and/or publicly available websites cast doubt on the certainty that their current student assignment policies had intentionally been structured to integrate students. Multiple districts stated in their transfer policy that they “retain the right to reassign students to create diversity,” but there was no mention of how often this reevaluation of assignment zones occurs, if it does at all. Likewise, it was frequently unclear whether districts’ transfer policies considered integration.

A different district with an unclear policy about school choice stated that it would assess to what extent the applicant pool for their schools reflected the district’s diversity. We found no evidence that they change their school enrollment composition after they engage in their assessment—only the statement that they will assess. This lack of transparency may make it hard for residents to assess the extent to which the district is actually making diversity a priority.

Understandably, districts might be afraid to publicize extensive integration details for fear of challenges, given the increased perception of risk due to legal decisions curtailing diversity efforts in education in this post–affirmative action era.¹¹⁶ Alternatively, districts simply may not be well versed on the best practices for integration and community engagement, including the way in which incomplete information about voluntary integration—particularly for choice-based policies—can inequitably affect access. Regardless of the reason, a common finding in our research regarding many (but certainly not all) districts is that there exists a lack of transparency between districts and the community about what specific steps districts are taking to integrate their schools and how sustained their efforts are.

Additionally, the Parents Involved and Students for Fair Admissions decisions make it more likely that districts will be reluctant to discuss or consider using racial integration policies. Our evidence suggests that districts are moving toward voluntary integration focused on socioeconomic diversity and shying away from bringing in any sort of racial considerations. However, race-neutral integration is generally less effective at reducing racial segregation.¹¹⁷ If districts want to use socioeconomic characteristics in place of racial composition to racially integrate their districts, the differences between race and socioeconomic status may not achieve the same levels of racial integration.¹¹⁸ Across the nation, “even though the percentage of white students who are low-income is lower than is the case for Black or Latinx students, there are more white, low-income students than Black, low-income students.”¹¹⁹ These empirical, varied relationships combined with some districts’ general lack of transparency could present a problem for maintaining the kind of rigorous, comprehensive integration necessary for true change across school districts. It also impairs research that could assess what plans exist and their effectiveness.

However, it is not impossible to engage in rigorous integration—even in this contemporary climate. Organizations such as IntegrateNYC have developed a framework for fostering more comprehensive integration. This framework includes tenets such as restorative justice, resource allocation, and representation.¹²⁰ These frameworks are reminiscent of Green’s earlier focus and the factors it required to fully dismantle segregated schools.

We now turn to voluntary integration efforts in K-12 education that extend beyond school districts’ efforts to integrate “regular” public schools. In particular, we review efforts to make “selective” schools—or those not open to all students—more racially and economically diverse. These efforts have come under legal scrutiny. We also review the subset of charter schools that are intentionally trying to be more diverse. These efforts are important given the high levels of segregation among charter schools nationally.¹²¹

Some larger districts or consortia of districts have schools—often high schools—that require students to apply to attend and that accept students based on criteria they have set. These schools go by different names; sometimes they are called exam schools or specialized schools. These are competitive schools that accept only a fraction of interested students and have historically not reflected the diversity of the larger district enrollment.

For decades, schools have engaged in efforts to expand equitable access for students from historically marginalized backgrounds and to create more racially and economically diverse enrollments. These efforts, however, have been subjected to legal challenges over the years, including the most recent efforts that revised admissions processes. This response was partially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made administering entrance tests more challenging.¹²² Some of the challenges have been similar to the arguments against Harvard’s and UNC’s affirmative action policies.

One of the earlier efforts subjected to litigation was Boston Public Schools’ set-aside of a certain number of seats for “walk zone” students for the district’s most prestigious exam school, Boston Latin School. The First Circuit struck down the formula that used race alongside grades and test scores to determine the school’s enrollment.¹²³ Later, in the aftermath of Parents Involved, some groups questioned New York City’s efforts to support Black and Latinx students in preparation for their entrance exam to specialized schools (the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, or “SHSAT”). As a result, the district transitioned its support effort to one based on socioeconomic criteria.¹²⁴

Two pending legal challenges to selective schools identify policies that pre-dated COVID-19. One was to New York City’s efforts to change the eligibility for the Discovery Program that helped high-scoring students who missed the SHSAT cutoff to gain entrance to the exam schools via a summer program. Students had to both be “disadvantaged” and attend a high-poverty middle school.¹²⁵ The plan also set aside one-fifth of each school’s entering class for Discovery Program students. A second challenge was to Montgomery County, Maryland’s middle school gifted magnet programs. The district successively implemented policies to try to more broadly screen incoming middle school students. The first policy screened every student, inviting the highest-achieving fifty percent to take an exam that governed entrance to the schools, thus reducing reliance on teacher recommendations. The second policy, implemented during the pandemic, screened all students for their eligibility and employed a lottery to select students from among those who were eligible. Both lawsuits challenging these two districts’ efforts to expand equity and integration asserted claims under the Equal Protection Clause. They alleged that the districts’ policies constituted intentional discrimination against Asian American students because the changes were projected to reduce the numbers of Asian American students who gained entrance. In New York City, the federal district court denied a preliminary injunction motion by the plaintiffs; this ruling has been appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In Montgomery County, the federal district court granted a motion for dismissal of plaintiffs’ amended complaint, which plaintiffs appealed to the Fourth Circuit.¹²⁶

To enhance diversity, other districts have moved toward greater consideration of where potential students live. For example, in Boston, the district’s three selective schools changed their admissions policy during the COVID-19 pandemic to consider interested students’ academic performance alongside their zip code. The implementation of this policy increased racial, socioeconomic, and geographic diversity in the schools. The policy was challenged as discriminating against students on the basis of race. Plaintiffs specifically alleged that zip codes were a proxy for race and therefore discriminated against white and Asian students. The district court upheld the plan, which had been implemented only one year before, and the First Circuit panel unanimously affirmed the lower court decision in December 2023. The circuit court held that “[t]here is nothing constitutionally impermissible about a school district including racial diversity as a consideration and goal in the enactment of a facially neutral plan.”¹²⁷ The school district no longer uses the challenged policy to determine which students can attend these selective schools, but it does use a selection process that considers students’ geography, as the challenged plan did.¹²⁸ Likewise, Philadelphia’s criteria-based schools instituted a lottery that gave preference to students in zip codes historically underrepresented in enrollment in the criteria-based schools. The selective schools do still consider test scores, for example, but they have lowered the minimum required score.¹²⁹ This replaced an admissions policy that had used criteria such as performance on standardized tests, teacher recommendations, behavior, and grades; the former policy also had given more discretion to principals in the admissions process. The district court denied the plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction, and the case is now in the discovery phase.¹³⁰

Finally, efforts to change the student selection process for Thomas Jefferson High School, a regional selective school in Alexandria, Virginia, were also challenged as racially discriminatory. The COVID-era changes included eliminating the use of a standardized test and replacing it with two race-evasive strategies that have been frequently used in higher education: a percent plan and holistic review. The school would consider the top 1.5% of students from each middle school served by Thomas Jefferson who met minimum eligibility standards. In this process, the school would take into account students’ experiences in a holistic review, which considered economic disadvantage, English learner status, and underrepresented middle schools. In 2022, the district court granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs challenging the school’s policies, but the Fourth Circuit reversed, holding that the policy did not discriminate against or have a disparate impact on the Asian Americans who challenged the policy changes. The circuit court noted that the changed policies that may, in part, have had a goal to improve racial diversity used “race-neutral measures … a practice that the Supreme Court has consistently declined to find constitutionally suspect.”¹³¹ Plaintiffs filed a motion for certiorari with the Supreme Court, which was denied in spring 2024.

Most of the examples described above feature traditional public school districts or groups of public school districts. Growing, yet still small, percentages of students are enrolled in charter schools. Charter schools are often operated separately from traditional public schools, with a separate authorization from the state or another entity, and may have flexibility regarding certain requirements. They are, however, still required to comply with all civil rights laws.¹³² Research has found that charter schools, overall, have high levels of segregation.¹³³ And a greater number of charter schools can also correlate with a higher rate of school segregation, including among non-charter traditional schools.¹³⁴

In more recent years, a small coalition of charter schools have been trying to intentionally integrate their school enrollment. A 2018 report by the Century Foundation identified 125 such charter schools, which they defined as having racially and economically integrated enrollment and evidence of some type of institutional comment about diversity, such as in responses to a survey or on their website.¹³⁵ These schools accounted for just under two percent of all charter schools open in 2014. The number of such schools had increased by more than fifty in the preceding five years.¹³⁶ The authors note, however, that sixty percent of charter schools examined had little or no evidence of diversity in their enrollment.¹³⁷ Given research about how charter schools’ presence affects traditional public school enrollments, understanding how intentionally diverse charter schools affect non-charter school segregation is also important.

As we celebrate the seventieth anniversary of Brown—and the sixtieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—much work remains to ensure that educational opportunities are available to all students on an integrated, equitable basis. This article has recounted the legal and political challenges facing local district leaders who, believing in the social science evidence and experiences of districts, are seeking to integrate K-12 schools. These local efforts are important but will not be sufficient if we are to truly realize the promise of Brown.

The school districts engaging in voluntary integration are now a small proportion of the total school population, but they are doing necessary work, informed by decades of research and experiences, to ensure that minoritized communities receive an equitable education and that students of all backgrounds are best prepared for their futures. As we consider Brown in its seventieth year, we return again to Brown’s aspiration: “[E]ducation is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. … It is the very foundation of good citizenship.”¹³⁸ We have reviewed research about the transition to a multiracial population and the importance of school integration in preparation for life in a multiracial democracy.

Brown’s vision of integration and educational equity has been weakened over time by institutions and individuals contending that the Fourteenth Amendment should somehow be color blind even amid a society in which race still matters deeply and inequality is rising. U.S. Supreme Court cases regarding education over the decades reflect a similar sentiment, weakening remedial integration and prohibiting more comprehensive forms of voluntary integration.

Yet, integration remains necessary today in the face of persistent isolation of students from minoritized groups. It is important that we remember how the Fourteenth Amendment was created—at the conclusion of a war fought to end the enslavement of Black people to ensure that they would be granted full citizenship. At Supreme Court oral arguments, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has noted that such an amendment is race-conscious in application to give racially minoritized groups redress from decades of discrimination.¹³⁹ Case law may be changing, but our stance on integration cannot. As seen in this article, the efforts of social scientists, lawyers, and racial justice organizers will be needed to support and expand locally adopted voluntary integration efforts now, seventy years after Brown.