A half-century after a landmark victory for civil rights and against segregated schools, racial separation is slipping back into classrooms across the country.

In the new post-busing era, many school districts are letting segregation return or undertaking failed strategies to stop it. For those still striving for integrated classrooms, no clear, effective solution has been established since school districts nationwide generally put forced racial busing in the past.

For a generation of students in Omaha and other large cities, the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision meant classrooms of color, if not a daily bus ride across town. But today, courts and school districts have stepped back from Brown in favor of broader choice for parents as to where children attend school.

Omaha joins big city districts in the trend, stressing parental choice and struggling with integration. Across the country, the trend raises questions about how much value school leaders place on desegregation.

"If you leave people to their own devices, then things can turn out badly," said Richard Kahlenberg, who studies integration issues for the Century Foundation, a public policy research group. "Integration is something you have to work hard to achieve. It's not going to happen automatically."

For years, the solution was automatic, through a court mandate: busing.

Today, one trend, at play in Omaha, is toward neighborhood schools, which tend to create homogeneous classrooms if the neighborhoods aren't integrated. Magnet schools, which Omaha also uses, are widely employed by school districts, but aren't always a lure to white, middle-class families.

In some places around the country, buses still transport kids long distances, although that is seldom forced.

While race once ruled as the dominant factor in student assignments, districts today aren't even clear whether they can consider race. Courts in the 1990s struck down that option, but three recent federal rulings have allowed its use.

Another trend in integration is more about breaking up concentrations of poverty than racial divisions. Some districts, including Omaha, have turned to socioeconomic integration - assigning students according to family income - to change the makeup of their schools and address low test scores in the inner city.

To many scholars and educators, integration's impact on educational quality takes the issue beyond a philosophical goal. As districts struggle with the achievement gap between whites and minorities, the affluent and the poor, integrated schools generally are considered to be a boost to educational quality.

Racial separation is factoring into the Omaha Public Schools' "one city, one school district" plan. The OPS leadership says the district's expansion plan would balance racial disparities between Omaha and the Millard, Ralston and Elkhorn districts.

Omaha Superintendent John Mackiel acknowledges shortcomings in his own district's level of integration, six years after it ended forced racial busing in favor of parental choice.

In OPS, one of every four black elementary school students last school year attended schools with 90 percent minority enrollment. Ten years ago, when forced busing was in effect, no black OPS elementary students were in such segregated schools.

Outside the Omaha district, meanwhile, nearly every white student in Douglas and Sarpy Counties attends schools that are at least 65 percent white.

National numbers also show that the level of school integration is slipping to a point not seen in decades. According to a recent study by the Harvard University Civil Rights Project, white students are being exposed to fewer blacks in school, while an increasing number of black students are attending more segregated schools.

To some, that represents a startling shift from one of the country's great civil rights achievements.

Jonathan Kozol, an author who will speak in Omaha Friday, said segregation has returned to the United States' public schools "with a dramatic sweep and vengeance." In the last 15 years, he said, the Brown decision has been dismantled.

"We have to rebuild the entire movement, the political movement, the national will to resurrect the dream that's been ripped apart," said Kozol, author of the recently released "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America."

Although the Brown decision came down in 1954, the first court-ordered busing plan didn't come down until 1971. By the 1990s, courts said school districts had addressed past discrimination and allowed them to halt busing.

That was a welcome change to many parents and communities, who disagreed with kids being transported across town to achieve racial balance. In many communities, busing led to white flight from cities and to strife, even violence.

Today, legal uncertainty surrounds the use of race in student assignment plans.

As school districts revamped their student assignment plans in the 1990s, courts ruled that broad racial balancing was a means to address school district discrimination, not make up for a community's housing patterns.

But a 2003 Supreme Court ruling that supported affirmative action in a university may have opened the door to racial considerations again, even if to a smaller degree.

Since that ruling, three federal appeals courts have decided that school districts could consider race as one part of their student assignment plans. The issue might end up being decided at the Supreme Court.

"It's unresolved right now," said Gary Orfield, director of Harvard's Civil Rights Project.

In general, today's student assignment plans focus on broader parental choice of children's schools.

Oklahoma City, whose release from court control in 1991 set a precedent for dozens of districts, changed to neighborhood schools. Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, N.C., the first district ordered to bus students, moved to more choice through extensive magnet school programs.

Although those districts are clear of civil rights violations in the eyes of the law, both have seen increasing racial separation. Both districts had an influence on Omaha's post-busing student assignment plan.

Wake County, N.C., which includes Raleigh, is drawing attention for assigning students according to family income, a concept known as socioeconomic integration. But as part of its plan, Wake employs a degree of mandatory busing.

Some say the enrollment arrangements aren't as important as the housing policies that determine where families live. The belief is that more affordable housing creates new housing options for low-income and minority families, along with a ready opportunity to integrate neighboring schools.

Omaha reflects another issue getting close attention nationally: segregation among school districts in a single metropolitan area. In the busing era, the Supreme Court kept desegregation plans within main city districts in all but a few cases.

But some districts, such as Minneapolis, now operate voluntary interdistrict transfer programs, similar to a formalized application of Nebraska's option enrollment law. The coalition of suburban districts fighting OPS says a transfer program is the solution to the dispute.

Kozol, the author, said he believes merging urban and suburban districts is the best option, which a court ordered with Louisville and Jefferson County. The OPS plan, which is short of a full merger but would grant the Omaha district more authority over public school students within the city limits, takes a similar approach.

Omaha school leaders stress their commitment to neighborhood schools, parentl choice and the voluntary use of magnet programs.

According to Orfield of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, that approach can work at magnet schools. But the more districts rely on voluntary participation, the more skillfully they need to recruit students and create better, more attractive programs. Absent that, he said, forced participation - even busing - becomes more necessary.

Too often, Orfield said, a school district's plan is simply a return to segregated schooling, either because districts are abandoning their integration efforts or say they can make those schools work.

"If you don't do anything about this problem, you're just betting on something that has never worked," Orfield said.

Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, which studies such issues as inequality, foreign policy and homeland security, agreed that strictly voluntary involvement can hinder integration.

Kahlenberg, who favors socioeconomic integration, said the most successful integration plans force every parent to rank their child's choice of schools. Schools then consider demographics or income to balance the classroom makeup.

That means some students might not get their top choices.

But if choice is placed entirely with parents, Kahlenberg said, segregated schools are the end result. He advocates a somewhat limited choice of schools, a concept called "controlled choice."

That's a concept Omaha rejected in its post-busing plans.

Said Kahlenberg, "The goal here is to honor choice and integration."

World-Herald staff writer Paul Goodsell contributed to this report.

Contact the Omaha World-Herald newsroom

Copyright ©2005 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or distributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.