<P> According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, desegregation of U.S. public schools peaked in 1988 . As of 2005, the proportion of black students at majority - white schools was at "a level lower than in any year since 1968". </P> <P> Some critics of school desegregation have argued that court - enforced desegregation efforts were either unnecessary or self - defeating . Numerous middle - class and wealthy white people continued moving from cities to suburbs during the 1970s and later, in part to escape certain integrated school systems, but also as part of the suburbanization caused by movement of jobs to suburbs, continuing state and federal support for expansion of highways, and changes in the economy . </P> <P> Some white parents in Louisiana said that they were afraid to drop their children off because of all the mobs surrounding the desegregated schools . </P> <P> Sociologist David Armor states in his 1995 book Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law that efforts to change the racial compositions of schools had not contributed substantially to academic achievement by minorities . Carl L. Bankston and Stephen J. Caldas, in their books A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana (2002) and Forced to Fail: The Paradox of School Desegregation (2005), argued that continuing racial inequality in the larger American society had undermined efforts to force schools to desegregate . They maintained that racial inequality had resulted in popular associations between school achievement and race . Therefore, the achievement levels of American schools were generally associated with their class and racial compositions . This meant that even parents without racial prejudice tended to seek middle class or better residential neighborhoods in seeking the best schools for their children . As a result, efforts to impose court - ordered desegregation often led to school districts in which there were too few white students for effective desegregation, as white students increasingly left for majority white suburban districts or for private schools . </P>

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