This report by the United States Commission on Civil Rights focuses on the desegregation of metropolitan schools. It begins by summarizing the research on the causes of racial isolation in metropolitan areas, and connects this research to issues raised in Milliken V. Bradley. In this case, the Supreme Court noted that legal decisions affecting school systems depended on whether metropolitan school and housing segregation was due to private choice and demographic factors, or whether they were due to racial policies in which the government participated. This report concludes that racial segregation in the inner city is due to policies of racial containment to which government contributes. Next, the Commission examines the remedial issues connected with metropolitan desegregation. Some have assumed that a metropolitan remedy poses major administrative and fiscal problems, that it breaches traditions of local control, that it involves massive busing, and that it is busing that provokes the resistence to desegregation. Each of these objections is analyzed with some care along with the positive advantages that may be associated with a metropolitan remedy. Finally, the state of the law and the current political context in which judicial decision making is occurring is discussed. This discussion indicates some of the cooperative steps that should be taken for constructive solutions. (Author/AM)