Sean Reardon

Houston is a very good example.

You know, Chicago there for a long time, uh, got a lot of credit, especially from Sean Reardon's, uh, analyses for really boosting achievement and, you know, there too, it helped that there was a strong charter sector, but it seemed like the district was doing good things as well on the teaching and learning front.

Maybe, you know, depending on how f- how we define big districts, we could find a few others, maybe a few of the big suburban districts, but, but you're right.

Spinning wheels seems to be much more common than the success stories that we are pointing to.

Even in my own search for some other source for these numbers, I found a variety of conflicting assertions across different DOJ publications.

So for simplicity's sake, and because they're probably the only correct ones, we'll use the numbers from this 2012 paper by sociologist Sean Reardon.

Reardon's research found that 1,071 school districts listed across the source material as having been, at some time, under a desegregation order.

But of those, he was only able to confirm the existence of such an order for 755 districts.

The paper's analysis is focused primarily on these school districts where, as of 1990, enrollment exceeded 2,000 students and the court order was still active.