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Dive Brief:
- The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division on Tuesday announced the dismissal of a 60-year-old desegregation case in Tennessee’s Dyersburg City Schools, continuing the Trump administration’s efforts to end school desegregation orders.
- The Justice Department said in a press release that the district “no longer operates as a segregated system,” and U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said the district had complied “in good faith” and that “the federal government has no legitimate reason to continue monitoring.”
- The case originated from a 1966 federal complaint against the Dyersburg Board of Education that challenged racially segregated public education in light of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many similar federal court orders forced schools to desegregate after Southern states initially resisted school integration as required by Brown v. Board of Education.
Dive Insight:
In addition to the Tennessee case, the administration has in the past year ended desegregation orders in other states including Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana.
The Justice Department in April 2025 announced one of its first decisions under the second Trump administration to end such an order in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish School Board. That decision, the department said, “righted a historical wrong, freeing the local school district of federal oversight,” adding that the school board would no longer “have to devote precious local resources over an integration issue that ended two generations ago.”
In subsequent announcements, the department echoed that sentiment, saying that it hopes districts can redirect taxpayer dollars and other resources.
The ending of school desegregation orders comes as the administration pushes to restore local and parental control of education in some K-12 areas, including in school choice.
They also come as a number of studies show segregation in U.S. schools is increasing.
A 2024 report from researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education and University of Southern California found that racial and economic segregation in large school districts has grown steadily over the past three decades. That increase appeared to researchers to be driven partly by policies favoring school choice over integration.
The report analyzed data from U.S. public schools going back to 1967, finding that segregation between White and Black students increased by 64% since 1988 in the 100 largest districts, and segregation by economic status increased by about 50% since 1991.
A separate 2012 study published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management found that racial school segregation gradually increased in over 200 medium-sized and large districts that were released from desegregation court orders between 1991 and 2008.
Those increases were more pronounced in the South, in elementary grades, and in districts where school segregation levels before their release from court orders were low, according to the research.
“These results suggest that court-ordered desegregation plans are effective in reducing racial school segregation, but that their effects fade over time in the absence of continued court oversight,” wrote the authors of the 2012 study.
