ABSTRACT
For many people, desegregation means eliminating student racial isolation and creating racially balanced schools. This is consistent with the celebrated U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decisions (1954, 1955). But school desegregation also involves the complete dismantling of separate or “dual” school systems, removing such “vestiges” of ethnic apartheid as program tracking, resource inequalities, and unequal access to qualified staff. Although often seen as primarily concerned with the statutory system of Black–White segregation in the old South, segregated schools have always involved multiple ethnic groups and quickly became a major issue in the urban centers of the northern and western United States. This chapter explores how the courts, Congress, and various administrative agencies have sought to devise means to hold school systems accountable for school desegregation. We limit our discussion here to the desegregation of student enrollment, because that is the fundamental issue and serves to clarify the nature and limits of desegregation accountability.
