Foreword
In the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the principle of “separate but equal in public education was inherently unconstitutional. In the decades that followed, Federal courts instituted mandatory desegregation plans that required public school districts to bus children, sometimes across town, to achieve racial balance in their classrooms. These plans, while often controversial and requiring some students to spend long hours each week in transit, generally achieved the stated goal of ending the de facto all-white and all-minority schools that had become prevalent in the past. Themandatory desegregation plans were…
