The US Supreme Court has consistently moved away from using race as a factor in deciding where children should go to school. It recently ruled that two districts' heavy reliance on race in student assignment policies violated the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.
But there are still hundreds of districts across the country, from the Northeast to the Southwest, that operate under federal court desegregation orders - some more than four decades old.
These districts are living in what critics consider a historical Twilight Zone, where federal judges can make seemingly contradictory decisions.
"So which ruling do I violate?" asks a perplexed Bobby Webb, superintendent of schools in Shelby County, where Memphis is located. "The judge's ruling now, or the earlier rulings that we can't discriminate against people on the basis of the color of their skin?"
Front-page court battles over integration are mostly a thing of the past. But according to the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice, there are at least 253 school districts still under federal court supervision in racial inequality cases - and those are just the ones in which Justice intervened.
Many of the more infamous names - Boston, Little Rock, Charlotte, N.C. - are gone from the list, having satisfied judges with their desegregation efforts and being granted what is called "unitary status." In the last two years alone, at least 75 districts have won such status.
Of those that remain, most are in the South. Georgia leads with 61, followed by Mississippi with 51, Alabama with 50, and Louisiana with 30. But longstanding cases are pending in Arizona, Connecticut, Indiana, and Illinois.
In June, the court ruled that student assignment policies in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., relied too heavily on individual students' races and were unconstitutional. But in those two districts, there were no orders to remedy past state-sponsored segregation.
