– Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting opinion in Milliken v. Bradley, July 25, 1974

This year, Americans marked the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ended legal segregation of public schools. It’s one of the Supreme Court’s most famous rulings and certainly its best-known education-related case. In many ways, though, Milliken v. Bradley — decided 50 years ago, in July 1974 — has more to teach about the current state of American education and what it would take to truly realize Brown’s promise of integrated schools and equal educational opportunity for all.

If Brown was the green light for school integration in America, Milliken — which addressed the question of whether the federal courts could require regional integration plans across district lines — became something of a flashing red. In overruling the cross-district remedies that lower courts deemed essential for true integration in metropolitan Detroit, the Supreme Court significantly limited the ability of the federal courts to order predominantly white suburban districts to integrate with predominantly black urban ones.

As Marshall sadly predicted, schools today are than they were when he wrote his dissent, with most of that segregation occurring between school districts rather than within them. Indeed, a whopping of the intense school segregation in the Detroit area stems from demographic differences between neighboring or nearby districts — a direct legacy of Milliken.

But the decision did not prevent states from adjusting district lines or taking other steps to promote cross-district integration. That’s exactly what they should do now.

The organization I co-founded, Brown’s Promise, has developed laying out concrete strategies for state leaders, advocates, policymakers and practitioners. States could, for example, transform school funding formulas to allocate resources according to a school’s needs rather than local property values. Or they could create interdistrict transfer programs and public magnet schools, like those that have fostered diverse classrooms in Hartford, Connecticut. States could also require districts to create plans for promoting integrated, well-funded schools within districts and schools, and systematically track their progress toward meeting those goals.

Achieving this sort of state policy change should not require litigation, but history teaches that legal action is necessary for forcing integration in American schools. Several active lawsuits offer a promising roadmap. Students, families and organizations in Minnesota, New Jersey and New York have filed lawsuits arguing that their states have a duty under their state constitutions to address segregation in their public schools. In Minnesota, for example, the state Supreme Court’s most recent ruling in the ongoing Cruz-Guzman school desegregation case underscored the state’s responsibility to address educational inequalities caused by segregation without requiring proof that the state intentionally promoted it. In New Jersey, the Latino Action Network’s school desegregation lawsuit has , seeking remedies after a judge . And an appellate court recently for a suit challenging segregation in New York City public schools to proceed.

These legal challenges are complemented by growing momentum in research, advocacy and community organizing around the country. In New York, is turning to youth leaders to light the way toward integrated, equitable schools. Earlier this year, New America released an innovative, that allows educators, policymakers and advocates to explore how district lines separate students from resources, opportunity and each other. And leading researchers at Stanford and USC recently published eye-opening new about the state of segregation in American public schools.

That research paints a bleak picture of a public school system that has, for decades now, been trending back toward segregation. Indeed, as legal scholar Martha Minow has noted, “.” But that does not have to be the end of the story. A new generation of students, educators, advocates and judges now have the chance to author a new chapter.

Milliken has been “one of the worst Supreme Court decisions” in the Washington Post, which decried its “awful legacy.” According to the , in the view of those who had fought for the end of segregation, it “killed any hope of integrating the public schools.” And, in 2014, the Harvard Graduate School of Education published a of essays calling the decision “dreadful” because it “betrayed the promise” of Brown v. Board of Ed, the historic ruling that outlawed racial segregation in the public schools.

Our organization, Available to All, fights educational redlining, and we often make the case that assigning children to schools based on where they live (using exclusionary maps) is morally wrong. 

District boundaries are one of our primary targets, as they often keep low-income kids trapped in failing schools, even while coveted public schools in nearby districts are allowed to turn those kids away. So you might think that we would join in the chorus denouncing the Milliken decision for these same reasons.

But that’s not quite right. In our view, Milliken was an unexpected but important decision by the Supreme Court. It was right on the law. Just as importantly, it put the brakes on a potentially disastrous social experiment. Hundreds of thousands of children, living in an area of over 800 square miles, would have been put on buses taking them far from their families and their homes every day. While many in the establishment supported bussing, it’s easy to see that the cost would have been born by the children, who would spend hundreds of hours on buses every year, robbing them of precious time with their family and friends. Those who designed the plan ignored this very real cost.

What’s more, such a plan likely would have had deleterious effects on public education in the Detroit area. A parent — of any race — would have been very eager to avoid such a fate for their children. You can imagine that many families would have moved to places like Utica, Trenton, and Northville, cities just out of reach of the social engineers. Others would have put their kids into private schools. 

Of course, the poorest of the poor would have been unable to afford either of these options, leaving them to bear the brunt of the reassignment plan.

That’s the key word in this whole saga: reassignment. Everyone involved in the case — and most commentators today — just assume that the government needs to assign children to public schools. Governor Milliken and his allies argued that kids should be assigned to schools based on race, while their opponents argued that kids should be assigned to schools based on their address.

Here is the huge moral problem with both of those positions: Whenever the government takes on the role of assigning children to specific public schools, then it also takes on the role of enforcing their exclusion from other public schools. This is why parents, in the 21^st century, can be put in jail for using someone else’s address to get their kids into a high-quality school. This is why school districts hire private eyes to and to conduct residency checks.

The answer to this conundrum is so simple: We need to move away from school assignments. Parents, not bureaucrats, should be allowed to ignore the arbitrary school district lines that divide our communities. 

Public schools should be required to be open to the public.

In practice, this means we need more and better Open Enrollment policies. In many states, public schools are not required to consider applications from students who live outside the district boundary. We have also argued that every public school should be required to reserve 15% of its seats for children who live outside of the attendance zone or the school district. But no child should be forced to attend a school outside his or her neighborhood.

The creators of the Detroit plan were right about one thing: Educational boundaries have indeed been used to separate Americans, and they have indeed contributed to the racial divisions in our schools. But the way to fix the problem is not to give bureaucrats the ability to ignore the school district lines as they determine the fate of hundreds of thousands of children.

It is American families who ought to be allowed to cross the lines.

Disclosure: Stand Together Trust provides financial support to Available to All and �鶹��Ʒ.