Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date

2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Department

Leadership & Policy Studies

Committee Chair

Steven Nelson

Committee Member

Derrick Robinson

Committee Member

Gina E Tillis

Committee Member

Ladrica Menson-Furr

Abstract

This research is situated at the nexus of race, racism, and care in education law, policy, and practice. State takeovers of schools and school districts in the United States have been rising for over thirty years, significantly increasing in the past decade. These takeovers raise questions of equity, accountability, integrity, and capability in many areas, specifically in terms of educating the nation's youth living in urban settings. State-led reconstitutions of schools and school districts have been and continue to be linked to racialized policy agendas, most notably those that seek to disenfranchise, dispossess, and confine Black and Brown students, families, and communities. As a result, this research focuses on how the state's control of public schools and school districts is permeated by white supremacy, anti-black sentiment, and a lack of care for those impacted. This research aims to explore how policies and discourses that enable and sustain state takeovers of public schools and school districts contribute to and maintain Black and Brown peoples' racial subordination. In particular, this work focuses on the roles of race, racism, and civil rights within these policies and discourses pertaining to current state takeovers. The first two manuscripts of this three-manuscript dissertation employs a dialectical-relational approach to critical discourse analysis to focus specifically on state takeover policy and discourses surrounding the Little Rock School District and the Lawrence Public School District. Additionally, this study aimed to address the void in the literature surrounding community voices and the intersections of critical care and race in state takeover policy by analyzing the narratives of Black and Brown peoples currently faced with a state takeover. The third manuscript utilizes a critical race care framework and phenomenological approach to thematic analysis to examine the lived realities of Black and Brown peoples now faced with a state takeover and left out of the state takeover narrative. This study asserts that state takeover policies maintain whiteness and white supremacy in urban school districts and education policy and are acts of dispossessing Black and Brown communities of their political power and their rights to self-determination, education, and existence in particular geographic locations.

Comments

Data is provided by the student

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest.

Notes

Open Access

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