State Takeover of Little Rock School District—Ten Years Later

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

Abstract

In 2015, the white Republican-led state board of education dissolved the majority-Black Little Rock School Board and transferred district control to the state commissioner of education, a white Republican appointee whose only educational experience was with home schooling (Clement, 2018). Distinct from the assertion of mayoral control over districts, state takeovers are problematic because frequently the statewide electorate is politically far more conservative than the electorate in a city school district (e.g., Little Rock, Houston, New Orleans; Morel, 2018). In such cases, democratic governance of public schools is revoked due to academic underperformance and/or financial mismanagement. In 2021, a new elected board was reinstated, but there was damage done, as reported by local media, including the stripping of collective bargaining rights from the teacher union and the expansion of charter school seats within district boundaries. The current study is a critical policy analysis (CPA; Young & Diem, 2017) of the administration of the takeover from 2015 to 2021, focused on the following questions:
1. Were there policies enacted under state control that negatively harmed Black students and families, or that have been empirically demonstrated to harm Black communities?
2. What effect did state control have on the threats of continued local control that takeover proponents proposed in 2015: within-district population decline, decreased district enrollment, declining student achievement in 6 identified schools)?
CPA uncovers the underlying assumptions and interests that shape educational policies, and it aims to highlight the voices and perspectives of those often excluded from policy-making processes. In the case of Little Rock, the pro-takeover white majority were found to have used morally disengaging persuasive mechanisms to defend the takeover, including elected and appointed government officials, journalists, community leaders, and advocates (Clement & Chen, 2024). The theorized effect of moral disengagement (Bandura, 2002) is that it relaxes one’s sense of culpability for actions they know will have negative consequences for another individual or group. Such suspension of self-restraint would not be necessary if the takeover were seen as an acceptable policy direction by the majority of Little Rock voters.
By analyzing media coverage, policy discourse (i.e., board meetings, public statements, punditry), public data from the Arkansas Department of Education, and the specific perspectives of Black policy actors in Little Rock School District, we chart the continued use of morally disengaging policy rhetoric post-reinstatement, the sustained damage to democratic structures in the district (e.g., collective bargaining, charter school competition), and the actual academic and fiscal outcomes of the takeover. Ultimately, the takeover ensured that power was concentrated in the hands of a select few, thereby disenfranchising Little Rock voters, especially Black voters, and white policy actors may have identified that a morally disengaging campaign was necessary to distract from these consequences.

Authors

• Davis Clement, Eastern Michigan University

• Donya Odom, Eastern Michigan University