With determined effort, where once dozens of school districts in Louisiana several decades ago were under court orders and supervision to desegregate racially, by the end of 2028 every one might be relieved of this useless burden, blazing a trial for other states to follow.

When cases were brought against many of these districts 60 years or more ago, they were deserved. Segregation was rampant, even after a dozen years had passed since Brown v. Board of Education (emphasized by other such cases in the intervening years). It would take a couple of decades to ensure policies were in place to prevent discrimination in education provision in many of these instances, and when such changes were brought to the attention of the particular federal district court, its judge would resolves these.

Yet others dragged on for decades after corrections had been made. Entering the second Republican Pres. Donald Trump Administration, Louisiana still had a dozen systems under these orders. The cases continued on autopilot, long after the designated judges or even the original plaintiffs had died. Fortunately, the Trump Administration has aimed to clear these cases from the books, seeing them as promoting race-based behavior in the absence of any proof of discriminatory intent.

Because today nobody seriously can argue, with any intellectual respectability and with any ability to point to specific actions and policies of governing authorities (meaning school boards) and the bureaucracies they command that denote racist intent, that there are a bunch of wild-eyed majority-race (meaning white) policy-makers and administrators out there trying to keep minority (meaning black) folks’ children down. Except that, despite all of this, there are some—those who are part of the cottage industry that has grown up around the whole enterprise and wouldn’t have reason to continue drawing resources to sustain itself without maintaining the rap that segregation still exists — who do insist otherwise.

They base this on the noxious notion that any inequality by race must, by definition, be caused by illegal discrimination; that is, outcome always defines intent. In their warped view, if there’s one school with a large majority white student body that appears to have better facilities, better test scores, and fewer disciplinary problems than a school at the same grade level in the district but with a large majority black student body, racism must be the explanatory variable. Thus, a court must step in to impose policies that equalize results.

But that’s not how the real world works. Take the issue of facilities and differential local funding between the school doing better and the more problematic one. In fact, the more problematic school likely is getting much more in the way of federal dollars than the other because it’s almost certain the socioeconomic status of those students generally is significantly lower than those of the other school. However, those dollars go to operations, whereas local dollars tend to go more toward infrastructure.

Yet throwing much more money at problematic schools for facilities makes little difference. What is now known as the “Kansas City Experiment” demonstrates that. Four decades ago, a court ordered the district encompassing that Missouri city to jack up spending—and thus taxation—on schools to erase racial differences in achievement. Tons of money later, the needle barely had moved on achievement or diminished racial differences, despite having schools more lavishly adorned with bucks than any others in the country—and segregation actually increased.

It failed because money wasn’t the problem. In reality, the problem was cultural in nature, arising from different attitudinal sets that largely define how economically successful people can be. Poverty is not largely a result of a lack of money, but comes from a lack of certain attitudes about work, thrift, delayed gratification, and related beliefs that bring success. And it’s not like this hasn’t been known for a good half-century; it’s been ignored because it defeats the political agenda of certain elites who want the world to believe everything is about a rigged distribution of resources.

Thus, where students come from environments that encourage living for today as opposed to saving, where respectful comportment is seen as stifling, and where belief in meritocracy is viewed as oppressive, they will feel less compelled to try to achieve. They will be more reluctant to discipline themselves or to receive corrective discipline, and more likely to degrade their school’s physical environment. They also disproportionately come from monetarily poorer environments and enjoy greater wealth redistribution from government, reducing the incentive to understand that more monetary resources come from adopting a certain set of optimal attitudes. Of course, those invested in the pretense that poverty is largely imposed by external forces dismiss this — tellingly — as “blaming the victim.”

The real victims are the parents who find their oversight of their children’s education circumscribed due to rules imposed from the outside, and administrators who must waste time and resources collecting data and writing reports in instances where a district has – perhaps for decades – engaged in no intended discriminatory behavior. Worse still, the forces invested in the status quo, who declare any significant outcome differences along racial lines to be discriminatory regardless of actual practices, want to keep it that way.

A return to sanity may be on the way. This month, state officials argued at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to exit St. Mary Parish schools from a consent decree. This actually was supposed to have happened over a half-a-century ago. But as often happens in these cases, matters fall by the wayside in the court system and ever since the district tried to get the court to dismiss, the plaintiffs, who didn’t object back then, have harassed to keep it open on the basis of statistical differences associated with race (or, more properly, socioeconomic status) but with no proof of genuine discrimination embedded in policy.

That persistence reflects the attempted redefinition by the political left of what constitutes discrimination—the same notion incorporated into diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology and underpinning efforts to force reapportionment of plenary bodies. Numerical disparity alone is deemed sufficient to signal discrimination, supposedly born of inherent racism emanating from the majority white population and requiring a race-based response to “fix.” The same dynamic is playing out in Concordia Parish, where an upcoming appeal asks the Court to allow dismissal of the decree, with both the district and the U.S. Department of Justice in agreement and uninterested in a lengthy trial. St. Mary’s case is even more compelling, as the district court in Concordia’s case had never previously indicated it would dismiss the matter, although the original plaintiff and its representatives there have become detached.

This effort is occurring only in Louisiana at this point. That’s because, even before the Trump Administration announced its intentions, the state began questioning why some cases were still on the books. It deserves applause for intensifying its efforts and seeing them through.

Where people live and families’ socioeconomic backgrounds today cause differences — not racism. Hopefully, the Court sees sense, and outdated decrees such as these soon will fade into history.