The End of Consensus: Diversity, Neighborhoods, and the Politics of Public School Assignments by Toby L. Parcel and Andrew J. Taylor (review)

At a time in which school enrollment is racially diverse yet neighborhoods remain segregated and there are increased legal restrictions on integration efforts, understanding under what conditions school diversity efforts are successful and retain popular support takes on renewed importance. Wake County is a unique case of a Southern school system that was never under court-ordered desegregation, yet the school board and community for years supported and pursued methods of achieving school racial, and later socioeconomic, diversity. In The End of Consensus: Diversity, Neighborhoods, and the Politics of Public School Assignments, Toby L. Parcel and Andrew J. Taylor explore the path of Wake County and what led to the dissolution of the district's pursuit of diversity.

Parcel and Taylor trace the story of diversity in Wake County schools through the use of both elite interviews with 24 participants and archival research, and a community survey with 1,706 respondents. Diversity and neighborhood schools are often framed as mutually exclusive options for school districts, but Parcel and Taylor argue that people in Wake County actually did not see it that way. Rather, most people who opposed the diversity policy in Wake County did not oppose diversity as a concept, but opposed the policies associated with diversity. Particularly, there were two policy lightning rods that focused the conflict: student reassignment and year-round schools. These findings reveal an important distinction in an era of polarization: that policies, rather than ideology, were most salient for most people.

A strength of this account of Wake County is the ability of the authors to build a rich historical context of policies and politics that shaped the public's reception of repeated reassignments and the use of year-round schools. Though Wake County's policy was voluntarily adopted by the school board, it was somewhat unique among current diversity policies in using mandatory assignment of students with very limited parental choice. Many political leaders have instituted various forms of school choice over the past three decades. Choice can serve, in part, to act as an outlet for those most frustrated with the failings of their assigned public school to exercise agency on a micro level (e.g., a transfer for their child) instead of working for policy change on a macro level (such as changing the district's entire assignment policy). However, the Wake County school board in the past decade provided limited options for such parents and, at the same time, due to a combination of rapid population growth and being beholden to county commissioners and voters for their funding, were juggling too many students in too few schools, particularly in areas where the new, affluent families were settling. The combination of diversity policy design—mandatory student assignment with no provision for grandfathering students—in this larger historical context was, unsurprisingly (though perhaps only so in retrospect), unsustainable to maintain a commitment to diversity.

More than simply describing the factors that led to the end of consensus, Parcel and Taylor are interested in connecting the discord to social capital reservoirs within the school district. They argue that social capital at home and at school creates different ties that can bolster a number of important outcomes, including academic achievement, connecting families with schools, and creating shared values. Parcel and Taylor find that there were differences in residents' support for diversity policy that related to the way in which they defined social capital; for example, those who trusted government tended to support Wake County's diversity policy. Yet, how they defined and operationalized social capital for their survey overlooked some key contextual aspects of Wake County. (Related, given that most public opinion polls find that parents have contradictory preferences with respect to school desegregation, more nuanced questions could have better probed residents' feelings about the relative importance of various student assignment principles, such as diversity and...