Abstract
In The End of Consensus: Diversity, Neighborhoods, and the Politics of Public School Assignments, Toby Parcel and Andrew Taylor present their study of an experiment in public school assignment policies in Wake County, NC, the home of the state capital, Raleigh. In 1976, the Raleigh City Schools merged with the Wake County School System to create a single consolidated district that operated under a court-ordered desegregation plan until 1982. At that time, having been released from the court mandate, the district implemented a voluntary desegregation plan, intended to avoid majority-minority schools, that continued in force through 2000. Then, under pressure from District Court decisions discouraging reliance on racial targets to achieve integration, the district turned to an alternative program based on socioeconomic integration. The aim was to avoid schools with disproportionate shares of students eligible for the reduced-price lunch program and students reading below grade level. One consequence has been that the level of segregation between black and white students—which was quite low in 1990—doubled by 2010, though it remained well below the national average for metropolitan school districts.
These shifts in school policy and the conflicts within the community that led to them are the backdrop for the study carried out by the authors between 2009 and 2011. In 2009, following an acrimonious and ideologically charged election campaign, four insurgents were elected to the board, creating a conservative majority whose best-publicized intention was to restore neighborhood schools. The new board implemented a version of a school choice program and shifted some assignments of low-income children to schools closer to their neighborhoods. But the district was busing many students for diversity, including students from city neighborhoods to suburban schools and from suburban neighborhoods to magnet schools in the city. And the choice program was ended after the political balance swung back in favor of a liberal majority in 2011.
Parcel and Taylor employed multiple methodologies to understand what was happening during this period. They interviewed twenty-four officials, leaders, and activists and conducted two focus groups, one with white participants and another with African Americans. They also conducted a survey of 1706 Wake County residents in the spring of 2011 to learn more about public attitudes and the nature of social divisions about school policy. Finally, they reviewed the literature on desegregation processes and policies in other districts around the country in order to evaluate Wake County within a larger context.
Their local data collection provides evidence for their main hypothesis that links public support for neighborhood schools versus diversity to issues of social capital. Briefly stated, lower-income families are burdened with work and commuting demands and find that neighborhood schools help them to manage these demands. In contrast, more affluent households with “more modest work commitments, strong social networks, and greater trust in government are more likely to have the resources to be accepting of diverse schools and the costs they may bring” (pp. xiv–xv). This perspective frames the issues very differently from the way they were presented in the national media at the time. Recall that this was a period when a conservative wing of the Republican Party was ascendant in the House of Representatives and many state legislatures, and stories about their influence in school boards were common.
In Parcel and Taylor’s account, though there was inevitably a strong liberal-conservative ideological dimension in the Wake County school board elections, other practical concerns were in play. There had been rapid population growth in the district in the previous two decades, straining budget resources and requiring new schools. With new schools came new attendance zones, so another concern related to neighborhood schools was a continual churning of children’s school assignments. Indeed, when the liberals regained control of the school board in 2011, they focused on stability in school assignments and support for low-performing schools more than on socioeconomic diversity.
The End of Consensus is a relatively short book focused mainly on a specific time and place. It is especially successful in demonstrating the complexity of diversity issues in schools and moving beyond the political rhetoric within which public discussion of these issues is often presented. It could be effectively used as a supplementary reading in courses on race and ethnicity, public policy, and education.