The U.S. Department of Justice announced last month the end to desegregation orders affecting dozens of mostly Southern school districts — including many in areas that have seen increasing segregation in recent years or are more racially segregated now than they were in the 1990s, according to a K-12 Dive analysis.
The Trump administration, which in response to a request from K-12 Dive shared the nearly 60 cases where oversight was ended, said in September it sought an end to the court orders because the settlements requiring school desegregation were "onerous and outdated."
“In this administration, we are ending prolonged federal oversight of these school districts because the effort does not reflect the reality of those classrooms today,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon in a Sept. 24 announcement.
The administration also stressed that the oversight had resulted from cases filed in the 1960s and 1970s, when the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal government compelled sometimes resistant districts to integrate by leveraging litigation and federal funding threats.
However, K-12 Dive's analysis shows that some orders were lifted for districts that still sit in the most segregated areas in their states. Nearly half were lifted in places that have experienced higher levels of segregation in recent years than three decades ago. Of the 50-plus education systems released from court oversight, just over a dozen were in areas with no White-Black segregation, and most showed at least some level of segregation.
The Justice Department — which can ask judges to dismiss cases in which it is in a legally binding desegregation agreement with the district — did not respond to questions on what criteria it used to determine a court order was no longer needed, nor how many more cases it is considering seeking dismissal for.
However, it said in the Sept. 24 statement that it was still conducting "a thorough case-by-case review of pending school desegregation cases." DOJ said it seeks to dismiss cases "after concluding that a school district has achieved unitary status" — or that it has no de jure racial segregation or that it has been eliminated to the greatest extent possible.
Local reporting suggests that motions seeking dismissal of school desegregation cases are now pending in other counties.
Where segregation has increased
Consent decrees were dismissed for school districts scattered across many states. Numerous programs, however, were concentrated in Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, with 10 or more cases dismissed in each of three states: Louisiana, Georgia and Mississippi.
The cases include those in areas with some of the highest levels of segregation in their states. For example, Bienville Parish is among the most segregated districts in Louisiana, coming in at 0.52 on the Segregation Tracking Project's database's scale of 0 to 1, meaning the proportion of White students in the average White student’s school was over 50 percentage points higher than in the average Black student’s school in that district in 2023.
Segregation in the Bienville Parish district's schools increased overall since 1991, when they were half as segregated at 0.25. The 2023 level of segregation is on par with the highest recorded by the database in the past three decades.
Bienville Parish is among the most segregated districts in the state of Louisiana, tracker shows
Similar trends can be seen in Louisiana's Desoto Parish, where the Justice Department also successfully sought dismissal of a case.
In Mississippi's Copiah County School District, the database shows segregation rose since 1991, peaking at 0.53 in 2023.
Of all the districts where DOJ succeeded in ending court orders, North Carolina's Halifax County Schools was among the most segregated, at 0.62 — meaning the schools were more segregated than integrated. The district's segregation levels spiked in 2019, and have continued to increase ever since.
Districts under less legal scrutiny?
When asked why the department is dismissing cases in areas with high and sometimes increasing levels of segregation, a Justice Department spokesperson told K-12 Dive in an email, "We categorically reject the premise."
"When a school district has acted in good faith for decades to eliminate the vestiges of segregation to the extent practicable, the law requires that federal oversight end," the spokesperson said. "The Department has filed more than 50 motions to dismiss these cases in states across the country, and not one has been denied. Dozens of federal judges have reviewed the facts and agreed with our assessment."
In a March 4 post by Husch Blackwell, a law firm that handles cases related to K-12 discrimination and compliance, attorneys noted, "Some recent government actions and court decisions indicate that the level of scrutiny required to attain unitary status may be in flux."
"Historically, school districts seeking unitary status have been subject to intensive scrutiny," the firm said, including having to show that they had eliminated segregation across all areas of their programs, including in student assignments, faculty, staff, transportation, facilities and extracurricular activities.
However, some legal requests for unitary status "seem to be facing less careful scrutiny" as of late, the firm said, with DOJ supporting several school districts seeking unitary status without requiring them to demonstrate the same level of evidence as before.
In U.S. v. Jackson County School Board, for instance, the Justice Department did not oppose the Florida school district’s motion for unitary status. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida granted the motion only one day after it was filed, and it did so without a hearing, according to Husch Blackwell. The case was dismissed in September 2025, according to local reports.
"School districts currently under desegregation orders may find a favorable environment in which to pursue unitary status," the Husch Blackwell post said.
Research finds more segregation after lifted orders
But when school districts are released from court-ordered desegregation, research has shown that racial segregation increases gradually in the subsequent years.
"It's just sort of gradual return to neighborhood schools in places that had had court oversight for desegregation previously," said Sean Reardon, director of the Educational Opportunity Project and a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford.
Reardon and his colleagues published research in 2012 showing that, once desegregation orders lift, increases in segregation are more pronounced in the South, in elementary grades, and in districts where school segregation levels were low before the orders were lifted.
"So they kind of reversed course," said Reardon.
When conducting the research, Reardon said, some school district leaders he spoke to weren't even aware they were under court order — suggesting that lifting the decrees may not always have an intentional or immediate impact on a district's policies and practices.
Instead, segregation levels typically increased slowly over a decade or so as student cohorts exited their court-assigned schools and incoming cohorts chose neighborhood schools, he said.
"The schools start to resemble the neighborhoods, which are more segregated than the school system used to be," he added. "And so there's sort of inertia.”
Some districts with dismissed court orders sit in increasingly segregated areas
Administration opposes integration efforts
The Justice Department's lifting of desegregation orders comes as the Trump administration has opposed integration efforts elsewhere. The department in February moved to intervene in a lawsuit filed against Los Angeles Unified School District by the 1776 Project Foundation. The conservative group sued the California district over its integration efforts, alleging the district’s policies discriminate against “a new minority: White students.”
The district’s integration program — which the American Civil Liberties Union says is court-ordered — focuses on schools with resident populations that are 70% or more Hispanic, Black, Asian or other non-Anglo. The lawsuit said those schools get funding to support class size reductions and are also required to hold two parent-teacher conferences during the school year, which the 1776 Project Foundation says discriminates against White students by denying them the same opportunities.
The Trump administration in July also proposed shuttering the nation's Equity Assistance Centers, which were originally established as Desegregation Assistance Centers under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For decades, the centers have provided technical assistance and training to schools, districts and school boards to “address education issues occasioned by school desegregation,” such as harassment, bullying and prejudice, according to the U.S. Department of Education website.
Thank you to @AAGDhillon and her team for working with us to end three outdated orders. This is just the beginning, we will keep working until every school district in Alabama is free from unnecessary consent decrees.
— Attorney General Steve Marshall (@AGSteveMarshall) September 24, 2026
The centers also help districts interpret data to identify disparities and to address those disparities through efforts like professional development for teachers.
The public comment period for the proposed rescission of the regulations governing the program closed on July 27. A final rule has not yet been issued.
