Some 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, US is going backward

America's school-age population is more diverse than ever before, reflecting the demographic shift rapidly taking place in our country. America's schools, however, are more segregated than they have been for decades.

During the two decades between 1970 and 1990, the nation made steady progress toward school desegregation, particularly in the South. At peak, 40 percent of black Southern students attended a formerly all-white school, while less than a third of all black students attended black schools.

Since the 1990s, that progress has been reversing in Southern public schools, while the largely intractable