Hartford’s Open Choice and magnet school systems are often lauded as the gold-standard when it comes to voluntary integration, but it turns out that over the past year things aren’t going as well as previously reported.

On Tuesday, the Hartford Courant published data that shows that the number of students attending schools with a “reduced-isolation setting” — schools where at least 25 percent of the students are white or Asian — dropped by a thousand students, mostly due to inner-city Hartford schools failing to attract white and Asian students from the suburbs.

The Hartford Courant has the story:

“The drop comes at a tense time for the Sheff parties, as both sides gear up for another potential court battle that could decide the fate of the long-running civil rights suit. Reasons for the decline are in the enrollment data: Four magnet schools that were deemed integrated last year no longer meet the Sheff standard, which requires that black and Latino students make up no more than 75 percent of the student body. In addition, a fifth magnet school closed over the summer and a sixth lost its magnet status and reverted to a neighborhood school.”