Recommended Reading

​to Understand the Takeover

Books
​Buras, Kristin. What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School . Paperback (Beacon Press, July 29, 2025)

Buras, Kristin. Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance (Routledge, 2014)

Buras, Kristin. Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City: Stories of Dispossession and Defiance from New Orleans. (Teachers College Press, 2010)

Morel, Domingo. ​Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy (2018, Oxford University Press)

Ravitch, Diane. Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America's Public Schools. (Vintage, 2020)

Articles about School District Takeovers
Klibanoff, Eleanor. TribCast: The rise of school district takeovers (TX Tribune, Dec. 16, 2025) A 47-minute video. Jaden Edison and Sneha Dey join TribCast to dig into what’s really behind these takeovers and what these districts, and all parents and students, can expect going forward. Robert Enlow is also a panelist here; he works with pro-voucher organization EdChoice.
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Dawer, Daniel I. “We are not your colony”: Policy discourses and resistance in Texas’s takeover of Houston Independent School District (AZU Education Policy Analysis Archives, Jan. 28, 2025) Dawer analyzes the Houston ISD community’s pushback to the state implementation of the TEA Takeover of the Houston schools.

Dey, Sneja and Edison, Jaden. Texas superintendents say school takeovers aren’t a sustainable way to boost student learning (Houston Public Media, Nov. 17, 2025) A report on the Tribcast video above.

Seay, Sarren, Jr. Small government takeover: The politics of public-school board dissolution and the impact on student achievement (Theory Into Practice v.63 May 20, 2024 Issue 3) This is an academic study.

Turley, Ruth N. López and Erin Baumgartner. State takeovers of school districts do not work. But there is something else that might (Kinder Inst for Urban Research at Rice Univ., 3/5/23) This was originally an Opinion piece in the Houston Chronicle on March 22, 2023. 

Older Articles
Barnum, M. (2018). “When states take over school districts, they say it’s about academics. This political scientist says it’s about race and power,” Chalkbeat. The author interviews HISD Takeover Commission member Domingo Morel about his book Takeover: Race, Education and American Democracy (Oxford, 2018). IDRA

Greenblatt, A. (2018). “The problem with school takeovers,” Governing. “Studies show they're ineffective and may unequally impact black and Hispanic communities.” Also a review of Domingo Morel’s book Takeover: Race, Education and American Democracy (Oxford, 2018). IDRA

Harris, A. (2019, October). “An attempt to resegregate Little Rock, of all places,” The Atlantic. IDRA

Pitchford, G.K. (November 8, 2019). Review of Detroit Public Schools During State Management 1999-2016. IDRA

Wilson, Terrence and Chloe Latham Sikes. State Takeovers of School Districts Don’t Work (Intercultural Development Research Assn (IDRA), May 2020) This article offers a brief overview of the history of state takeovers across the US since 1989. (Citations from this article are also included in this list labeled as IDRA)

Wong, K., & Shen, F.X. (2005). “When Mayors Lead Urban Schools: Assessing the Effects of Takeover.” In W. Howell (Ed.) Besieged. The Brookings Institution. Available in full text through ResearchGate.net. IDRA

Zimmer, R., Henry, G.T., & Kho, A. (2017). “The Effects of School Turnaround in Tennessee’s Achievement School District and Innovation Zones,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 39(4), 670-696. Abstract: “We examine the effects of each of three strategies implemented in Tennessee  and find that iZone schools, which were separately managed by three districts, substantially improved student achievement. In schools under the auspices of the ASD, student achievement did not improve or worsen. This suggests that it is possible to improve schools without removing them from the governance of a school district.”
​IDRA