Multiple studies have shown the negative consequences of school segregation, and the positive effects of school integration. In this study, we devise a framework called the three goals of public education in a diverse democracy to analyze the racial/ethnic and socio-economic landscape of educational access and opportunity, and parental attitudes about the value and feasibility of school integration policies within a highly diverse, yet segregated county. We draw upon semi-structured interviews with a diverse group of 42 parents, and school and neighborhood-level quantitative data and GIS mapping to answer our research questions. Our results highlight the extreme levels of segregation and inequality across the 22 urban/suburban districts in Essex County. For example, 48% of black and 27% of Hispanic third graders attend schools that perform in the bottom 10% of all New Jersey schools. In comparison, the three diverse school districts in the county provide important evidence to support school integration by showing higher outcomes in ELA and math for all student subgroups, as compared to the racially and SES-isolated urban school districts. We find that while most of the parents believe that it is very important for school-age children to be exposed to diversity in schools, some still choose segregated schools—either private schools, charter schools, or mostly white, suburban school districts, instead. During the parent interviews, we were able to probe deeper on this finding and found that parents were sometimes conflicted about weighing the relative importance of high quality education (meaning high test scores) and diverse education—if they even had those options to begin with. Overall, the data show that there is meaningful support among parents for diverse, interdistrict magnet school options that would start in kindergarten and are intentional about diversity at the school (students and teachers), classroom (heterogeneous groupings), and curricular level. We argue, therefore, that Essex County would be a perfect place for an interdistrict remedy that has the potential to teach the state and country valuable lessons about the benefits of school diversity.