It has been argued that the effects of the desegregation of public schools from the late 1960s onward were limited and short-lived, in part because of white flight from desegregating districts and in part because legal decisions in the 1990s released many districts from court orders. Data presented here for 1970-2000 show that small increases in segregation between districts were outweighed by larger declines within districts. Progress was interrupted but not reversed after 1990. Desegregation was not limited to districts and metropolitan regions where enforcement actions required it, and factors such as private schooling, district size, and inclusion of both city and suburban areas within district boundaries had stronger effects than individual court mandates.Few court decisions have affected American society as deeply as the mandate to desegregate public schools issued in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education. A common view in the 1950s was that "you can't force integration." The experience of the last 50 years provides a test of that view. How has school segregation changed during this period? Where has there been progress, and how has change been shaped by policy choices about how public education is organized in different parts of the country? This study provides an updated evaluation of how court orders and federal intervention affected segregation within school districts in the post-Brown period, arguing that a "regime of desegregation" was established in the period from 1970 to 2000, under which actual desegregation progress did not depend directly on mandates.Although most scholars have focused on the policies of individual school districts and on court decisions that have been implemented at the district level (e.g., Orfield and Monfort 1992), this study treats school segregation as a metropolis-wide phenomenon. A large share of overall segregation, possibly more than half, is attributable to racial disparities between districts (Rivkin 1994;Clotfelter 1999;Reardon, Yun, and Eitle 2000). Accounting for segregation between districts is critical for assessments of the effectiveness of desegregation policies, because desegregation cannot increase interracial contact if it motivates white families to abandon racially mixed school districts. Many analysts from the 1960s to the