School integration crested as 44 percent of southern black students attended majority-white schools (1988), reducing to 34.7 percent (1996) and 31 percent (2000). Most court-ordered plans to end school segregation, including busing, terminated by 2000. Forty percent of blacks and Latinos, compared to four percent of whites, were in majority–minority and high-poverty urban schools (2006). According to a 2012 report, “80% of Latino students and 74% of black students attended majority nonwhite schools (50–100% minority)” (Orfield and Sigel-Hawley, 2012, p. 9).

Resegregation bares the nation's retreat from Brown, exposing racial, ethnic, and class disparities; “white flight”; proliferating private and public charter schools and suburban school districts; and Supreme Court decisions like Oklahoma City v. Dowell (1991), terminating court oversight of that city's school desegregation. Moreover, in 2007 the Court disallowed Seattle, Washington and Louisville, Kentucky schools’ voluntary steps to desegregate, enhance diversity, and terminate minority student isolation by means of a race-based assignment plan.