The Coalitional Politics of District Debt: Bridging Grassroots Power and State Policy in California

• In Event: (Re)Building Democracy in the Wake of State Takeover: Community-Led Research and Resistance as Repair

Abstract

Public schools face the “perfect storm of financial chaos” as federal pandemic relief funds wind down, student enrollment fluctuates, and state revenue continues to decline following decades of disinvestment. Struggling districts – overwhelmingly Black, Brown, and working class – are often portrayed in the media as inherently dysfunctional, unable to balance their budgets. These racialized framings are most explicit in the ‘takeover’ of school districts by states and municipalities, a policy mechanism where local school boards and central office oversight is suspended in cities with historically Black leadership, including Newark, New Orleans, and Detroit (Buras, 2014; Morel, 2018; Nelson, 2019). In California, the creation of the Fiscal Crisis Management and Assistance Team (FCMAT) in 1991 was pivotal in reshaping district governance and politics by empowering an independent, yet state-authorized, audit agency with fiscal control of local governments. Under a single administrator not from the community and without a school board to deliberate on critical issues, swift cuts are made to valuable student programs, services, and schools under “fiscal crisis.”
On the ground, growing community resistance to these austerity conditions ranges from impassioned public comments at school board meetings to occupations of schools slated for closure. However, channeling local frustration into sustained political power brings new challenges. In this paper, I analyze an emergent state-wide coalition bridging anti-austerity efforts across California districts, particularly Inglewood and Oakland, to address their mounting debt through legislative campaigns and political education. Drawing on fiscal surveillance (Kissell, 2023) and semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and policy documents, this paper extends such scholarship by tracing the rise and reach of one audit agency in California through the perspectives of stakeholders in districts that underwent state receivership. Using a community-engaged approach, my collaboration with the coalition of parents, students, non-profit organizers, and community members includes identifying issues most pressing in their mobilization advocacy efforts and cultivating a narrative strategy campaign via biweekly meetings.
Preliminary findings point to the coalition’s reframing of debt from localized cases of mismanagement to structural disinvestment, and the policy compromises made in coalition-building across distinct political contexts. The coalition sought to shift the blame from individual cases of financial mismanagement to a structural issue by questioning the legitimacy of the state audit agency’s authority and policy recommendations. However, stakeholders carried divergent strategies for engaging California legislators around the politically charged issue of district debt forgiveness, with some members resigned to the fact that it would not be possible even in a firmly Democratic legislature. Organizers based in urban districts, bonded through shared histories of disinvestment and punitive financial accountability measures, worked to appeal to suburban and rural districts around the value of “local control.” Political advocacy efforts illuminated the ways in which school finance is particularly inaccessible to working class African American and Latine families in its reliance on technocratic expertise. Drawing on the AERA 2025 theme of remedying harm, this paper addresses the underexamined strategies for regaining local control following the erosion of democratic mechanisms in communities of color, particularly state-level organizing and advocacy campaigns.

Author

• René Espinoza Kissell, University of California - Santa Cruz