In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education made grants to eleven school districts under the Technical Assistance for Student Assignment Plans (TASAP) program. The impetus for the program came mainly from the Council of Great City Schools, which was concerned that school districts would respond to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Parents Involved in Community Schools decision by dismantling policies intended to maintain diverse school enrollments. In this paper, we use data from interviews with federal and local participants to identify the theory of change behind TASAP and to determine the local effects of TASAP. The federal government’s intentions for the grants were often vague to people in the field. Also, local politics generally led to the TASAP grants having less diversity-oriented effects than the federal theory of change assumed. Nonetheless, the program satisfied the Council’s desire to see that districts would “do something” in the area of diversity, and it may in the long run prove to have laid important groundwork for the future.