Backlash? Schooling Reassignments and the Politics of School Desegregation

March 2025

School desegregation efforts often spark fierce political backlash. This dissent is typically ascribed to families’ dissatisfaction with the changes in schooling assignments required to achieve desegregation aims. In this paper we use the empirical context of the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) to estimate the effect of diversity-driven schooling reassignments on public engagement with educational politics, operationalized as turning out to vote in WCPSS school board elections. Specifically, we combine unique data detailing the geography and timing of school reassignments within WCPSS with rich, longitudinal, individual-level voter registration and turnout data to estimate the effect of living in an area where the district has reassigned students to a different school on voter participation in WCPSS school board elections held between 2001 and 2009. Estimated in a difference-in-differences framework, our results show that schooling reassignments substantially increased the likelihood that a registered voter cast a ballot in subsequent WCPSS school board elections, with these effects disproportionately driven by increased turnout among white voters.

Keywords

School desegregation; education politics; school boards

Education level

K-12 Education

Topics

Policy, Politics, and Governance