Q. You’ve written about takeovers in Louisiana and Massachusetts, both of which have seen positive results. What can we learn from those examples?
A. There are some interesting contrasts between Lawrence, Massachusetts, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Both had positive results, but the communities were quite different and the states went about trying to improve the school systems in very different ways.
Leading up to the reforms, New Orleans was a predominantly Black community with high levels of intergenerational poverty that had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The state opted for mass firings of teachers, and the district became nearly completely charter. Charters are public schools of choice that are managed by independent operators and have significant autonomy and flexibility from many of the regulations that apply to traditional public schools. Most often, charter school teachers are not unionized. This path to becoming an all-charter district was unusual. There are no other districts in the country that are made up entirely of charter schools.
Lawrence, Massachusetts, served an almost exclusively Hispanic student population, including significant numbers of recent arrivals from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. There, the state actively replaced only 10% of the teachers while more aggressively replacing principals. No schools technically became charter schools, though they recruited charter organizations to manage a small number of schools. However, even the charter-managed schools in Lawrence remained neighborhood-based and unionized.
These two examples help to show how different approaches to reform can lead to academic achievement gains. But the differences in both the reforms and the contexts themselves makes it difficult to draw out patterns and lessons about “what works,” which may vary depending on the context, based on a small number of case studies.
Q. When expanding the scope beyond New Orleans and Lawrence, what do researchers see when comparing the impact of takeovers of predominantly Hispanic districts versus predominantly Black districts?
A. We find evidence that the racial composition of the district’s student population plays a role in the likelihood of state takeovers. Even when you control for academic performance, majority-Black school districts are more likely to be taken over than majority-white school districts performing at the same level.
The research also reveals that the impact of takeover varies depending on the racial and ethnic composition of the targeted community.