(FORTUNE Magazine) – How integrated are American schools? In particular, how many black children attend schools that might reasonably be viewed as integrated? These seem like sensible questions to ask, since the effort to desegregate the schools has been a riveting theme in our public life for four decades. Hundreds of school districts remain under federal court order to increase their respective degrees of racial balance, and just two months ago the Supreme Court triggered another round of controversy by releasing a district in Georgia from one such order. Reading that decision, it suddenly occurred to us to get answers to the questions above. But the answers prove oddly elusive. They are not in Digest of Education Statistics, a fact-freighted volume published annually by the Department of Education, and nobody in the the department is able to provide them to inquiring reporters. After extensive back-and-forth with various authority figures in DOE, we had only some 1988 data on integration, and these were for ''all minorities'' -- i.e., they lumped together blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans. These figures are not without interest. They show, for example, that roughly half of all minorities were in schools at least 30% white. But they included no data enabling one to judge the trend or the overall success of the long, contentious, agonizing crusade to get black kids into integrated schools. The department says there has essentially been no demand for such data. Can it really be that nobody cares whether the crusade is being won or lost? The amazing answer seems to be, yes, nobody much cares. And the only possible explanation for the answer is that, somewhere along the way, educators have simply lost faith in the principal rationale for black-white integration: that it raised the academic achievement of black children. To be sure, this was not the only rationale. Integration can also be defended for the greater experience of the world it gives children. But the original Coleman Report (1966) seemed to promise much more. The report indicated that integration did work in some measure to raise black kids' achievement in school. Subsequent research efforts have not as a group borne out this proposition, and many scholars have plainly given up on it. Keeping Up asked Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander if it is the + department's position that integration results in better educations for those kids. After a long silence, we asked again. Finally, we got an answer: ''No comment.'' The sea change in thinking about school integration seems not to have affected the legions of federal judges still trying to dictate black-white ratios to the school districts under their control. School districts will plainly remain under court orders for many more years, which in the circumstances also seems amazing, or possibly not.