In 1981, Cambridge, Massachusetts, became the first school district in America to replace its neighborhood schools with a “controlled choice” assignment plan, which considered parental preference and racial balance. This article considers the history preceding this decision to explore how and why some Americans became enamored with choice-based assignment at the expense of the neighborhood school in the late twentieth century. It argues that Cambridge's problematic experience with open enrollment in the 1960s and 1970s created a vocal, consumer-oriented, and politically active class of parents who became accustomed to choice and, by the early 1980s, dependent on its benefits. Moreover, controlled choice proved especially attractive in this university community because Cambridge had a constituency of well-educated, middle-income parents who possessed the social capital to identify the best educational opportunities for their children, but lacked the economic capital to use real estate to gain access to their preferred schools.

Progressive education swept across Canada in the early to mid-twentieth century, restructuring schools, introducing new courses, and urging teachers to reorient the classroom to the interests and needs of the learner. The women religious who taught in Vancouver's Catholic schools negotiated the revised public school curriculum, determined to utilize the latest methods and meet public school standards in hopes of receiving government funding. But they were equally adamant about preserving Catholic beliefs regarding human life and resisting “false” philosophy. Despite their caution, progressive education began to transform Catholic pedagogy in this period, most notably in religious education. Looking back over the decades, Catholic educators in the early 1960s would observe that progressive education had brought about a shift in schools that emphasized process over content and self-expression over discipline. They found themselves questioning whether the curriculum undermined revealed knowledge by overemphasizing empirical science as the foundation for all knowledge.

When the New Orleans school board appointed E. J. Edmunds, a light-skinned Afro-Creole man, the mathematics teacher for the city's best high school in 1875, the senior students walked out rather than have a “negro” as a teacher of “white youths.” Edmunds's appointment was a final, bold act by the city's mixed-race intellectual elite in exercising the political power they held under Radical Reconstruction to strip racial designations from public schools. White supremacist Redeemers responded with a vicious propaganda campaign to define, differentiate, and diminish the “negro race.” Edmunds navigated the shifting landscape of race in the New Orleans public schools first as a student and then as a teacher, and the details of his life show the impact on ordinary Afro-Creoles as the city's warring politicians used the public schools both to undermine and reinforce the racial order.