Evidence of all the links between where people live and how they think about schools have piled up: Research shows that rising income segregation in America since 1990 has been largely driven by the housing choices of parents with children, as higher-income families pursue the neighborhoods that come with the best schools. Another recent study found that the spread of online public school ratings has driven up the price of housing near higher-ranked schools, contributing to the sorting of wealthier and white families into those neighborhoods.

In addition, research has repeatedly found that communities with more comprehensive school desegregation plans have had faster declines in racial residential segregation than places without such school policies. And when Montgomery County, Md., required developers to build affordable housing in wealthier neighborhoods, poorer children who had access to good schools in those neighborhoods excelled in math and reading.

Other policies that might help disrupt the feedback loop between neighborhood and school segregation include measures to equalize school funding within states across school districts, so that wealthy communities with higher property taxes wouldn’t inherently have more to spend on education, compounding the advantages that also make housing in those districts more desirable.

School ratings systems that include diversity and not just test scores could provide a different signal to home-buying parents, who often say in the abstract that they value school diversity even if they oppose means like busing of creating it. Tax credits to develop affordable housing or housing vouchers given to individual families could also be leveraged to move more families closer to good schools. Districts could draw attendance zones in ways that cut across neighborhoods with different demographics.

Some of these choices would have to be made locally. But the federal government could offer grants to entice districts and states willing to make them.

In the absence of integration, perceptions of the “best schools” become incorporated into housing prices. And white homeowners defending their property values perceive threats in the possibility of integrating schools — or in the loss of “neighborhood schools” they control.

“It looks different when you’re contesting a busing plan in a metropolitan area in the 1970s than it does when you’re contesting a school zoning plan in Manhattan in 2019,” Ms. Erickson said. “But I think the core linkages, especially for white people, between racial segregation and ideas about educational value and property value — that feels quite enduring.”

Busing alone never could have unwound that knot. The more relevant question for presidential candidates today is what could — and how they plan to talk to white parents about that.