You may recall the iconic painting of little Ruby Bridges, a first-grader, who was the first African American student to enroll in a previously all-white segregated school in New Orleans. If you don’t, be sure to read this article, which tells what happened to the William Franz Public School.
Three scholars–Connie L. Schaffer, Martha Graham Viator, and Meg White–tell the story. The three are also the co-authors of a book titled: William Frantz Public School: A Story of Race, Resistance, Resilience, and Recovery in New Orleans, which I am reading now and expect to review.
They write:
If that building’s walls could talk, they certainly would tell the well-known story of its desegregation. But those same walls could tell another story, too. That story is about continued racism as well as efforts to dismantle and privatize public education in America over the past six decades.
When little Ruby Bridges enrolled in November 1960, she was escorted by four federal marshalls. Crowds of angry whites jeered day after day. Parents of the white children in the school withdrew their children and sent them mostly to private segregated schools.
Racism drove many white families from the neighborhoods near the school and other areas of New Orleans to abandon the city. White enrollment steadily declined throughout New Orleans’ public schools, dropping more than 50% between 1960 and 1980.
By 2005, only 3% of the students enrolled in the city’s public schools were white – far below average for midsize American cities.
Racially segregated, underfunded William Frantz Public School suffered through the imposition of standards and accountability in the 1990s, which did nothing to help the school, but did result in its being labeled a “failing” school. By 2005, the school board voted to close it.
In 2013, the school reopened as Akili Academy, a charter school directed by a private corporation. The authors wonder whether the public school system that Ruby Bridges dared to desegregate, overseen by an elected board, is “a relic of the past.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I was born in 1959. When I started teaching college in SC, one of my older students, who just happened to be born the same year I was, had attended a segregated elementary school in rural SC for his first few years as a child. He remembered desegregation as simply happening. One year the white and black students went to school separately, the next year they were together. He told me that he was surprised to learn in his history of education class that in larger cities not that far away from his hometown desegregation was bitter and violent. He commented that the only time the black and white children were separated in his community had been in school. They played together before and after school. I’m sure race relations were far from perfect, but it was a small community where everyone knew everybody else. Perhaps that was the difference. It is much easier to be cruel to a stranger than a neighbor.
The neighborhood schools as Ruby Bridges and others who experienced them in New Orleans are certainly dead. There is no way the formally elected school board, plus the private charter school boards, will vote to return neighborhood schools. The challenges of de-segregation remain, despite the riddance of traditional, community-based schools.