On Friday the Boston Globe editorialized in favor of a possible state takeover of the Boston Public Schools, pointing out city-state political obstacles. It isn’t city-state politics at issue though. It’s racial politics.
In Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), Domingo Morel finds that state takeovers of public school districts disproportionately and negatively affect African American political empowerment. As black political power rose in cities through the Sixties and Seventies, a conservative education logic arose that “professed to educate black children at the same time that they invested in the political failure of the black community.”
Takeover is about the political effect of takeovers on communities of color. There are different impacts depending on how empowered a community is at the time of the takeover. Black communities are mostly negatively affected but some Latino communities have seen their political empowerment augmented, since they started out with very little political power. (Morel cites one study that argues that Latino political power in Lawrence has been enhanced). Nationally since 1989 there have been over 100 state takeovers of local school districts in the country; eighty-five percent of those have occurred in districts where blacks and Latinos make up a majority of students.
As urban black political power rose in the Sixties, conservatives were in opposition due to fiscal concerns but also because black political mobilization constituted a political threat. The Nixon and Reagan administrations sought to disrupt federal aid to cities by placing more authority in the states. “Conservatives capitalized on white racial resentment and fear of black political mobilization and black political control of cities to justify an expansion of state authority.” This ran contrary to conservative ideology of placing power in the smallest units of government but served political purposes.
Conservative education logic proposed to separate the education of black children from the political power of black communities. “Every state takeover law passed between 1980 and 2000 came after successful school litigation efforts in the state’s courts.” Race, economics, and politics are all factors in the likelihood of a state takeover.
The issue with conservative education logic is that despite professed efforts to improve education for communities of color, the interest has never been to produce citizens of color. By promoting black citizenship, and all of the rights and powers that accompany citizenship, conservatives would be forging a path to their own perceived self-eradication. The conservative movement in the states emerged as a response to black citizens’ demands for power and the recognition of citizenship. Thus, the conservative education logic has professed a concern with the education of black students and other students of color at the same time that is has invested in the political failure of those communities. However, as scholars have noted for centuries, the process of education cannot be separated from the process of creating citizens. Any attempt to separate the two at best produced meager effort that inevitably results in failure.
In Boston, alone among Massachusetts communities, control has not resided in an elected school committee for years. Instead, the mayor has been the real power. The Globe’s proposal would place political power at an even more distant reserve from the city’s residents.
Whether or not a state takeover (or the threat of one, which the Globe proposes as leverage to force the city to adopt reforms it likes) would help education outcomes is an open question. The Globe says that a takeover in Lawrence improved schools there. But a takeover in Holyoke has accomplished little. Morel states that what is known of successful education reform does not support school takeovers.
Morel began his research into takeovers in 2012 and attended many school board meetings, among them some in Newark. “The dominant narrative was that Newark had failed to produce an adequate education for its children and state authorities had to intervene in a district that had failed to meet this basic requirement.” But in attending school board meetings while Newark was under state control Morel found a highly engaged community—hundreds of people would attend school board meetings:
“Perhaps the takeover occurred not because people didn’t care—but precisely because they cared and demanded more.”
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, not education. But as I’ve come to realize that reform proposals often seem to disenfranchise communities of color, sometimes I write about that too.]
Why would anyone thin that the state bureaucracy a nd politicians would do a better job than the city bureaucracy and politicians? Out of the frying pan into the fire!