Control+Alt+Delete: Authoritarian Educational Leadership and the State Takeover of Houston ISD

• In Event: Power as Resource, Tool, and Constraint: Examining Power in Educational Organizations

Abstract

In this qualitative case study of takeover implementation in Houston Independent School District (HISD), we draw on two years of participant observations, document and artifact analysis, and in-depth interviews with HISD constituents to describe how authoritarian leadership can be enacted in public school districts through enabling policy and political conditions. Two questions guided our study 1) how did HISD leaders enact authoritarian leadership to advance district regime change during the first two years of state takeover? and 2) how did HISD principals and teachers experience authoritarian leadership?

Drawing on concepts from education leadership (Trujillo, 2013; Tschannen-Moran, 2009) and political theory (Greitens, 2016; Montagnes et al., 2019; Rosenfeld & Wallace, 2024), we identify three dimensions of authoritarian leadership: creating a culture of control, manipulating information through propaganda and censorship, and consolidating power by removing and replacing dissenters with loyalists. We then turn to an emerging strand of research that conceptualizes takeover as a domestic form of political regime change (Nelson, forthcoming), interpreting takeover’s undemocratic removal of elected leaders and centralization of authority as creating the conditions for authoritarian regimes to seize power.

Data sources included 49 in-depth interviews with teachers and principals, 85 hours of participant observations of meetings and events, 54 relevant documents and artifacts, and over two years of news reports and media interviews with state leaders and appointed district officials.
We utilized an abductive analysis strategy that involved multiple rounds of inductive and deductive coding while drafting analytic and reflective memos and employing “alternative casing” through multiple theoretical perspectives (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012, p. 177). After noticing many participants used analogies and metaphors to compare their experiences of takeover to life under authoritarian rule, we examined the literature on authoritarian leadership as an alternative theoretical casing and employed three deductive codes (control, manipulation, and removal) to categorize participants’ experiences.

By replacing HISD’s elected trustees with a state-appointed board of managers and superintendent, the Texas Education Agency created an anti-democratic atmosphere that enabled a project of authoritarian regime change. We identify three tactics of authoritarian leadership that undergirded this project: (1) control, or deploying the New Education System (NES) instructional model as a coercive apparatus to compel teacher and principal obedience; (2) alt, or constructing an alternative reality through a public relations campaign that sought to neutralize media and community criticism; and (3) delete, or removing programs and people identified as threats to the takeover regime.

Like the computer keystroke combination used to interrupt a program’s function and force a system reboot, the sequence of Control+Alt+Delete that unfolded under the takeover attempted to trigger a hard reset of HISD as an authoritarian regime. Our findings point to the risks of implementing an authoritarian approach to educational leadership, as the reform model adopted in Houston dismantled the district’s institutional memory and hollowed out its internal capacity for change. This study also contributes to a modest but growing body of qualitative case studies of takeover implementation by revealing the distinctly authoritarian character of the leadership model enabled by takeover policy.

Authors

• Daniel Dawer, University of Texas at Austin

• Meredith Wronowski, University of Dayton