The Supreme Court declared in 1954 that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Into the 1970s, urban education reform focused predominantly on making sure that African American students had the opportunity to attend school with their white peers. Now, however, most reformers take as a given that the typical low-income minority student will attend a racially isolated school, and the focus, under the banner of "No Excuses," is to make high-poverty, high-minority schools effective. What role should racial desegregation play in 21st-century school improvement? In this forum, Susan Eaton, research director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, makes the case for refocusing school reform on creating integrated schools. Steven Rivkin, professor of economics at Amherst College, questions whether desegregation efforts fulfilled their promise and points out complexities to the issue that researchers have barely begun to examine.