No Shades of Gray

When Kentucky's Jefferson County district assigns students to a school, they are counted as either black or "other."

Louisville, Ky.

A visitor to the map room of Kentucky’s Jefferson County school district arrives at a windowless con ference room in a bunkerlike office building and faces walls covered by huge maps of Louisville and the surrounding county.

Superimposed over the maps’ streetscapes are color-coded territories with handwritten labels, defining clusters of the district’s elementary schools, as well as the attendance zones of its middle schools. Those details, and many others on the maps, have been worked out with a fine attention to the racial composition of the city’s neighborhoods.

Pat Todd, the director of student assignment for the 97,000-student district, gestures to explain the student-assignment schemes on the maps, which apply to most of the district’s 88 elementary, 24 middle schools,...