Southern school desegregation fell sharply after 1968 but stalled before completion.

Evidence

The Supreme Court rulings did have an effect on the Southern schools which reported a significant decline in segregation between the years of 19681980, particularly for black students attending schools that were severely segregated with 90 to 100 percent minority (Orfield 1983, 3). Desegregation was, however, no where near complete by 1980 where one third of black students still attended predominantly minority schools and the desegregation process began to slow (Orfield 1983, 3). — Marcy Crouch, Magnet Schools and Other Means of…, 7

Categorization

• SEED: An essay could ask why court-ordered integration peaked around 1980 and then reversed, treating the ‘slow’ as a policy choice rather than an endpoint.