Republican lawmakers in Illinois last month pitched a bold plan for the state to seize control of the Chicago Public Schools, one of a growing number of states that are moving to sideline local officials and take over struggling urban schools.
Governors and other authorities in Michigan, Arkansas, Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia, Ohio and elsewhere -- mostly Republican leaders who otherwise champion local control in their fights with the federal government -- say they are intervening in cases of chronic academic or financial failure. They say they have a moral obligation to act when it is clear that local efforts haven't led to improvement.
"I want to protect the schoolchildren and their parents; that's my first duty," Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, said about his plan, which would wrest control of the nation's third-largest school district from elected city leaders and was immediately opposed "100 percent" by Democratic Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
After Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican presidential candidate, seized the schools in Youngstown last July, he described it as an eleventh-hour attempt to save young lives. "If you're a school district that's failed year after year after year, someone's going to come riding to the rescue of kids," Kasich said, describing the Youngstown school system, which has regularly received an F on state report cards and where just 1.1 percent of the Class of 2013 was deemed ready for college.
Eleven states have passed or debated legislation to create state-run school districts in the past year, according to the Education Commission of the States, which tracks state education policy.
"There certainly is an effort afoot in the country to dismantle local government and reduce or eliminate the role of local school boards," said Thomas Gentzel, executive director of the National School Boards Association.
State takeovers were once a rarity, but they have become increasingly popular as the number of states controlled by Republicans doubled between 2010 and 2014.
"There's been a sea change of Republicans taking control of a great many states, and this model is quite appealing to them," said Kenneth Wong, chair of the education department at Brown University.
In the most recent versions, states are creating "recovery districts," in which they take control of large numbers of schools scattered across several districts.
Although the particulars vary, an appointed manager wields broad powers to redesign schools or close them entirely. The state manager can hire and fire, set curriculum, reconfigure the school day, sell property and, in some cases, break existing labor contracts. Increasingly, state managers are turning over traditional public schools to charter school operators, which are funded by tax dollars but are privately managed.
The idea is that the state can bring aggressive change in a way that local politicians, with their community ties and loyalties, cannot.
The best-known example is the Recovery School District in Louisiana, created by state lawmakers in 2003 to convert struggling traditional schools in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport into charter schools. The district now consists of about 70 charter schools.
But the move to replace locally elected school officials with outsiders has yielded uneven results. Takeovers in Newark, Detroit and Memphis have not improved test scores -- indeed, some schools have gone backward.
"These ideas kind of travel like wildfire," said Kent McQuire, president and chief executive of the Southern Education Foundation, which recently analyzed state takeovers in three states. "But you can't really find evidence that there's been positive, sustainable changes in learning in those places."
And the takeovers have sparked protests, legal challenges and complaints of racism. All state takeovers to date have occurred in school districts that are impoverished and majority black and Hispanic.
"These proposals are not really about school reform or improvement," said Philip Lanoue, the 2015 national superintendent of the year who runs a school district in Georgia, where Republican Gov. Nathan Deal wants to change the state constitution to enable takeovers. "These takeovers are entangled with money and power and control."
In Georgia, Deal wants to create an Opportunity School District composed of as many as 100 low-performing schools across the state.
But voters would have to amend the state constitution, which currently stipulates that education must be controlled by "that level of government closest and most responsive to the taxpayers and parents of the children being educated."
If the referendum passes in November, Atlanta would be most affected, with 27 eligible schools.
The mere threat of a takeover has prompted the Atlanta Public Schools to act. It hired a top Deal education aide to advise the city on how to avoid one. Atlanta Superintendent Meria Carstarphen announced last month that she was inviting charter school operators, local nonprofit agencies and other organizations to submit proposals for ways to boost performance of those 27 struggling schools.
One elementary school in Clarke County, Lanoue's district, would be a candidate for takeover. He said lasting improvement doesn't come from a top-down makeover.
"If you really wanted true reform, wouldn't you work directly with school boards and the school system?" he said.
One of the most contentious takeovers has been the seizure of the Youngstown City Schools in Ohio, which the Kasich administration orchestrated behind closed doors.
In summer 2014, Tom Humphries, president of the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber of Commerce, said the governor told him to devise a plan to fix the schools.
"This is about these kids," said Humphries, adding that the region has had difficulty attracting new employers because of an undereducated workforce. "They only get one opportunity, and this is about their lives. We can't keep doing the same things. They're not working."
He launched 10 months of secret meetings between top Kasich administration officials and a handful of community leaders.
Participants' notes released by the state show the members pledging secrecy out of concern for expected public resistance. After nearly a year of discussions, the Kasich administration unveiled plans for a state takeover that includes dissolution of the locally elected school board and appointment of a chief executive officer with broad powers over local schools.
The administration and its allies in the state Legislature rushed the legislation, getting it approved by a committee and narrowly passed by both houses of the Legislature less than 24 hours after it was made public, drawing protests from Democratic lawmakers who said it violated procedure.
The law would apply not just to Youngstown but to any Ohio school district that receives an F grade from the state three years in a row.
Talking to reporters four months ago, Kasich was baffled that some in the community oppose the takeover of a failing school district.
"What do they want to do? They want kids to continue to fail?," Kasich said. "People ought to be outraged when kids are trapped in failing schools. It's a disgrace."
A Section on 02/02/2016