For all of society’s emphasis on diversity and inclusion, an uncomfortable pattern has been documented for decades: As communities grow more racially and ethnically diverse, trust, civic engagement and support for shared public goods can weaken. Our research doesn’t overturn that pattern. It reframes it.

The real problem is not diversity itself. It is diversity without inclusion.

Public education provides a useful lens for examining the impact of this problem. Looking across thousands of U.S. school districts, we found that greater racial diversity is indeed associated with lower levels of local support for public schools. That shows up in two consequential ways: the funding communities raise to keep schools operating day to day and the bond measures that finance long-term investments, dozens of which are on this year’s ballots.

These are not abstract differences. Local funding helps determine what schools can spend on teachers, classrooms, facilities and educational resources. Because community support is an important determinant of the level of school revenue, weakening that support can deepen differences in educational opportunity from one community to another.

But our findings also point toward a more hopeful conclusion: The negative relationship between diversity and support for public schools largely disappears in communities where residents are more integrated, more connected and more likely to see themselves reflected in their schools and other local institutions — communities that are inclusive as well as diverse.

That distinction matters because in many American school districts students may attend diverse schools but return each afternoon to communities that are socially and geographically separated. Families from different racial and ethnic groups may live apart, interact infrequently and have few opportunities to develop the relationships that create a sense of shared stake. When residents are asked to increase operating support for schools through tax increases or long-term investments through bond measures, that lack of connection can matter. Public education depends on people being willing to invest not simply in their own children but in an institution serving an entire community.

Our recent study examined nearly 122,000 data points across 12,766 school districts over a decade. We found that diversity had its most negative relationship with school support in less inclusive communities, particularly where racial differences also coincided with political differences and relatively segregated schools. In more inclusive communities with shared values and more representative schools, the negative relationship was no longer significant.

Diversity and inclusion are often spoken about in the same sentence, as though progress toward one naturally produces progress toward the other. It does not. Diversity describes who is present. Inclusion describes whether people live, interact and participate together.

That distinction will become increasingly important as the United States grows more diverse. Demographic change is not the question before us; it is inevitable. The question is whether our communities will become more inclusive at the same time.

School support emerges from an interconnected system. Residential patterns influence who encounters whom. School boundaries and assignment policies affect which families share institutions. Political divisions influence collective priorities. Representation affects whether residents see public schools as truly serving the whole community.

Operations research allows us to examine these relationships together rather than treating demographic diversity, social connections, political divisions and institutional representation as separate phenomena. It helps us understand how organizational structures can either reinforce or bridge divisions among stakeholders.

The findings point toward several practical levers. Communities can encourage residential integration and opportunities for meaningful interaction across racial and ethnic groups. Schools can consider how student assignment and representation affect whether families see the institution as their own. Civic leaders can work to strengthen shared priorities around education rather than allowing demographic and political divisions to harden into separate ideas about who benefits from public investment.

None of this means every diverse community will behave the same way or that inclusion alone can solve every challenge facing public schools. It does mean that demographic diversity cannot be treated as the endpoint. America’s growing diversity is not a problem to be solved. The challenge for local leaders is ensuring that inclusion keeps pace with it.

Farzam Boroomand is an assistant professor in the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. Aseem Kaul is a professor in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.