Despite education policies to the contrary, demographic changes have been the driving force behind the resegregation of American schools.

While the U.S. began its move away from formal segregation in the mid-1950s, by the 1990s a trend of declining white presence in minorities’ schools had appeared. Jeremy E. Fiel examines these trends, and looks at why minorities are increasingly attending schools with fewer whites. He argues that despite favorable changes in the social and policy factors that affect students’ distribution across schools, demographic changes have been the driving forces in the apparent resegregation of schools in the past two decades. He writes that previous policy measures to encourage diversity in schools may no longer be effective; new ones are needed now to reverse the trend towards increasing minority isolation.