A state move to take over Memphis-Shelby County Schools is picking up steam after the district鈥檚 board dismissed its director eight months into the job.

State Rep. Mark White, chairman of the House Education Committee, said Monday he is putting together a bill that would enable the Department of Education to create a management group to run Memphis-Shelby County Schools without oversight by the school district鈥檚 board of education.

White, an East Memphis Republican, said the school board鈥檚 firing of Marie Feagins as director of schools on January 21, is one more reason the state should take over the district, in addition to poor student performance.

鈥淚鈥檓 a believer that Memphis-Shelby County Schools can do a lot better than they鈥檙e doing,鈥� White said.

Under the plan, which wasn鈥檛 filed in time for this week鈥檚 special session on private-school vouchers, the state would put together a group that would 鈥渟upersede鈥� the school board for at least two years 鈥渢o right-size things,鈥� White said. School board members would continue to be elected but would serve only in an advisory role, he said, adding he is working on the legislation to make sure it鈥檚 legal.

Senators from Memphis blasted the idea Monday, with Senate Minority Leader Raumesh Akbari calling it an 鈥渁ttack on democracy.鈥�

鈥淚nstead of punishing local decisions, we should focus on moving forward together,鈥� Akbari said, to deal with funding inequity and invest in schools.

Likewise, Sen. London Lamar, chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus said she is concerned by House Speaker Cameron Sexton鈥檚 plan to draft a bill enabling the state to acquire control of the Memphis school district.

鈥淪uch a move represents significant government overreach and threatens the foundational principle of local governance,鈥� Lamar said.

For instance, the Achievement School District that primarily targeted struggling schools in Memphis is being dissolved, and most of the schools under that district remain in the bottom 5% statewide for student performance, Lamar said.

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris is lobbying lawmakers to drop the state takeover, hoping cooler heads will prevail.

鈥淲e鈥檙e doing the best we can to defuse the situation and turn down the temperature,鈥� said Harris, a former state senator. 鈥淓verybody talks about the focus is on the kids. Well, if the focus is the kids, we can鈥檛 focus all of our energy on trying to punish the adults.鈥�

White, who agreed to dissolution of the Achievement School District after keeping it afloat for several years, said it served a purpose in removing some schools from the state鈥檚 鈥減riority鈥� list for poor performance and pushing Shelby County Schools to set up iZone schools, which received more school district support until the district ran out of funds to keep the program going.

鈥淲e鈥檙e not moving the needle for our community with all the opportunity we have,鈥� White said. He added that some schools in the district closed because they didn鈥檛 have enough students, then were trashed by thieves, making it impossible for charter school operators to buy or lease them.

The Memphis-Shelby County School Board fired Feagins over allegations dealing with overtime expenses, acceptance of a $45,000 donation, questions about federal funding and missed grant deadlines, and conduct detrimental to the district.

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As predicted four years ago by the state鈥檚 ed insiders, Education Commissioner Mike Morath鈥檚 appointed superintendent 鈥� former Dallas Independent School District chief Mike Miles 鈥� has revealed plans involving turnaround strategies that have worked elsewhere in the state. These include using big pay hikes to restaff the district鈥檚 most challenged schools with top talent and upgrading the skills of the principals they report to. It鈥檚 exactly what one side wanted and the other feared.  

Overshadowed by the political scrum, though, are the roots of the 2015 law that requires Morath to intervene when a district repeatedly fails to address chronically underperforming schools. The legislation, House Bill 1842, was, in fact, written by Harold Dutton Jr., a Black Democrat who for almost 30 years has represented a district that is home to several schools that he and others say Houston has neglected for years.

Dutton is a graduate of one of the schools, Phillis Wheatley High School, named for an enslaved woman who became the first published African American poet. Opened in 1927, the school at the time was one of the largest Black high schools in the country, in part because Houston鈥檚 white civic leadership was willing to lavish it with resources in an effort to prove that racially separate schools could be equal 鈥� then the law of the land.

As he recounts in this new 74 Interview, Dutton grew up a proud product of this legacy, only to realize 鈥� as a lawmaker frustrated with the stalemates that plague education policy 鈥� that his beloved Wheatley was failing his constituents’ children. Every year since 1930, his alma mater has chosen a high-achieving student 鈥� typically a senior 鈥� to serve as that year鈥檚 Miss Wheatley. In 2000, Dutton was trying to find all these distinguished alums so he could invite them to an event when he had the heartbreaking epiphany that fueled his advocacy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

蜜桃影视: What prompted you to author House Bill 1842?

Harold Dutton Jr.: When I got to the legislature, one of the things I wanted to do was be on the public education committee. I had always thought of Houston as a sort of education bastion, particularly in terms of Wheatley High School, which I attended and graduated from. I just wanted to make sure they were all right. 

Along about the year 2000, I sponsored an event for my high school for its 75th anniversary called the Purple and White Gala to recognize and honor all of the Miss Wheatlies that had come through at that time. I got all their pictures and their bios. I went around trying to find them and then communicate with them.

What I noticed was that the early Miss Wheatleys all had great accomplishments. The first Miss Wheatley was also the first Miss Prairie View A&M University. We had one who was an actress. There were all kinds of all kinds of professions. We even had a Miss Wheatley who had been a part of the moonshot at NASA. 

But as I put all their bios and pictures on the wall, and as I got to the late 鈥�80s, I could see a total decline in the education accomplishments of the Miss Wheatlies. I found one who was working at McDonald’s. That shocked me.

It was a beautiful event. But afterward, I started taking a look at all of the schools in my district. I realized there had been a huge decline in student outcomes and achievements. 

There’s another high school in my district, Kashmere High School. I found that Kashmere students never pass the standardized test because they never did well on the math portion. I called the superintendent of HISD at the time. I asked him, 鈥榃hat’s wrong with northeast Houston education? And in particular, what’s wrong with Kashmere?鈥� 

He told me students didn’t do well on the math portion of the test. I said, ‘I know that 鈥� but why don’t they do well?’ He said he didn’t know. I said, 鈥榃ell, I do.鈥� I took a look at whether Kashmere students had the benefit of a certified math teacher. What I found was that they hadn’t had one in 20-odd years.

I went to the school board members on the west side of town and said, 鈥楾his is crazy. Why don’t you help me do something about it?鈥� They said, 鈥榃hy don’t you go and talk to your own school board member? I don’t represent [that school].鈥� I said, 鈥楴o, you represent HISD 鈥� you got elected in your area. They insisted this was a problem that I had to take up with my own school board member.

In Houston, we have nine single-member districts where school board members get elected. What had happened was the school board members had become territorial, to the extent that they didn’t recognize that a problem outside their district was still a problem they needed to help resolve.

I went to him and said, 鈥業 got to figure out some way for the school board members to have skin in the game about all the schools. I need to put an amendment on your bill that says that if you have a campus in your school district that is failing, your whole school district is failing and the state could come in and take over.鈥�

Now, some [lawmakers] asked me, 鈥榃hy would you do that, when one school is the cause?鈥� I said, 鈥楾hink about it this way: If child protective services comes to your house because one of your children is alleged to have been abused, they don’t leave the other four children. They take everybody.鈥� 

This 鈥� this is a form of child abuse. To the extent that we’ve had children go on and on and on in a failing school.

This wasn’t my first attempt at trying to change the situation. The first thing I did was sponsor a bill requiring HISD to be divided into four parts. Each part was going to have its own superintendent, because I thought having the superintendent closest to us would get us to where we needed to be. Well, that bill didn鈥檛 pass. 

I started researching again and came up with another bill that said we were going to create what was called an opportunity school district in Texas. It would be a school district that would take all of the low-performing schools, all the failing schools, put them in this district and the state would run it. We would fix the schools up and give them back to the district they came from. That didn’t pass. 

I kept at it. The [2015 takeover] bill passed, and so my amendment passed. Everybody was for it. The teacher groups, the NAACP, everybody. I think they were thinking like I was: No school district would let a campus fail for five consecutive school years. That just wasn’t going to happen.

But yet, in 2019, that’s what happened. Not at Kashmere, but at Wheatley. The schools in north Houston, they were all suffering. The children there were being shortchanged by the school district. 

Now, having said all that, HISD has always had its problems. I remember when Brown v. Board of Education was enacted in 1954. I was in elementary school. That Supreme Court decision said, 鈥榊ou should eliminate this by all deliberate speed.鈥� I don’t know if ‘all deliberate speed’ means as slow as you can, but by the time HISD implemented it, I was in college. So here we are. 

One of the things people said to me was, 鈥榃e don’t know if it鈥檚 going to be better.鈥� Let me tell you something. I had a premonition one night when I was watching television, and it was all about slavery. Some of the slaves had gone into a room one night, and they were planning to escape. They went and woke this one slave up and said, 鈥楥ome on and put your clothes on, it鈥檚 time to go.鈥� He said, 鈥榃here are we going?鈥� And the other slave said, 鈥榃e’re going to freedom. While I can’t say 100% for sure that it’s going to be better, I can tell you, I’m 100% sure that we can鈥檛 stay where we are.鈥� 

From my perspective, this is offering a better outcome for students and families, particularly in north Houston. HISD could have done a number of things to eliminate failing schools. 

Do you think that Wheatley and Kashmere should stay open?

Absolutely. I don’t think ever we want to look at closing schools. 

Wheatley has a distinction that probably no other school in the state has. It was one of the schools that at one time in the not-too-distant past had three alumni serving in the Texas House of Representatives at the same time. It was a school where at one time we had a sitting congressman. We had a sitting county commissioner. We had a sitting state school board member. We had a sitting local school board member and we had a state representative.

All from that school alumni.

The challenges we face now in terms of getting it back? I don’t think we meet those by closing the school. I think we meet those by giving these children what they need. 

I heard one comment that offended me to no end: that these are poor children. And I said, 鈥榃hat the heck does that have to do with learning?鈥� Because I can tell you, we were not poor, we were po. We couldn’t afford the 鈥榦鈥� or the 鈥榥.鈥� And yet we learned.

This is the school where Barbara Jordan graduated. It’s the school where my good friend who just ended a term as president of Prairie View graduated. The former president of Brown University was a Wheatley graduate. The Jazz Crusaders all came from Wheatley. 

That’s why I’m hopeful that we’re headed to a place where these kids will get what they need in terms of the resources and we’ll move on. And all the noise we hear today will be growing pains.

Are you troubled by the current conversation about the takeover?

No. I anticipated there will be some people who didn’t understand that while I might be inclined to agree with them insofar as not wanting the state to take over, I’m more upset at failing schools. I’m more upset at denying students a future if they don’t get an education.

But I understand that there’ll be some people who will be against this. When you think about the past, whenever there was a change for the better, there was always 鈥� you can go back as far as Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt 鈥� there was people complaining about it. And thinking that they should go back to Egypt.

That’s kind of what this is. There’s some people who think we need to go back.

Almost every community of any size has a Wheatley, a beacon of excellence, beloved by its community, where the names of the alums are on the tip of your tongue. Yet expectations at some point slid, as did resources and accountability.

That’s the biggest problem 鈥� the low expectations.

When I first moved to New York, I wanted to go see Reverend Ike. I can never forget, when I got there, the title of his sermon that Sunday was, 鈥楾he only thing wrong with poor people is they ain’t got no money.鈥�

I thought about that. What is that supposed to mean in terms of education? In terms of education, it shouldn’t mean anything. We should educate those students so that somehow or other what God put in them we get the benefit of, because we educated them.

There are too many people, particularly Black males, standing around on corners who we didn’t educate. We don’t enjoy the benefits of what God put in that person.

There was an eleventh-hour proposal on that night鈥檚 agenda, but no vote took place. Instead, the meeting dissolved into a fracas, as trustees screamed at one another, members of the audience screamed at the board and police wrestled people out of the room. The board adjourned without addressing the looming deadline.

It was the fourth month in office for newly elected trustee Sue Deigaard, a longtime education advocate and the parent of two Houston ISD graduates. Now, almost exactly five years later, as the state appoints a board of managers to take over the sprawling school system, her feelings are 鈥� complicated.

The law in question 鈥� which Deigaard, like most Texans, refers to by its legislative file number, House Bill 1842 鈥� was the brainchild of a Houston-area lawmaker frustrated by years of district inattention to the impoverished schools in his portion of the city. In 2015, a bipartisan majority voted to require the state to step in and take over when a district has had one or more 鈥淔鈥� schools for five years. 

Lawmakers later amended the law to let districts stave off state intervention by closing the schools or giving control of them to a nonprofit partner such as a university, city government or charter school network. 

Because they can provoke vociferous opposition, school closures are among the most difficult decisions an elected board can make. And the prospect of charter school partnerships was anathema to the district鈥檚 teachers union. As Deigaard notes in this 74 Interview, the result was that small but impassioned groups of people shouted down every proposal for a local solution.

A few months after the Houston board adjourned without taking any action to head off sanctions, Texas officials announced they were investigating complaints that board members 鈥� not including Deigaard 鈥� had engaged in irregularities involving contracts and that a majority had violated state law by meeting in secret to work out a plan to replace interim Superintendent Grenita Latham. The results of the investigation also justified a state takeover, Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath said.

In 2019, the board sued the agency, claiming it had no authority to install a board of managers. In January 2023, the state Supreme Court lifted an injunction that had stopped Morath from moving forward. Dominated by new members, the Houston board voted to stop pursuing the lawsuit. Many of those who had opposed the changes were quick to claim that the ensuing takeover, which is slated to take place June 1, was a politicized move against a blue-city district by a Republican governor bent on privatization.

Deigaard will stay on after Morath appoints the nine-member board of managers, though she will be stripped of her official powers. current board members will be asked to serve as advisers to the appointees. The state will eventually return control to elected board members.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Set the stage for us. You ran for a seat on a school board that had been embroiled in one high-profile controversy after another for years. You must have both a titanium spine and a vision for transformation in Houston ISD.

I wanted to try to take the politics out of it. I wanted to transform what our public education system looks like. We have a system that was created in the middle of the 20th century, in a very different time societally, economically. That system was not designed to be effective and equitable for all kids. It was intentionally designed not to. And all we keep doing is trying to tinker around the edges 鈥� in a time where our society and our economy are incredibly different. 

It’s not like I entered the lion’s den having never visited before. I had been going to board meetings. I knew who the players were. I knew we were coming through this tumultuous time. I knew we were still transitioning to a new superintendent. 

Of the nine board members, three of us were new that January. Six weeks after we were sworn in, new superintendent Richard Carranza announced he was leaving to go to New York. In June, we rejected a proposed budget in the hopes that the [district] administration would bring us back something better. They didn鈥檛. We ended up voting to adopt the exact same proposal. We were going to have our own district form of government shutdown, because we wouldn’t be able to pay the bills. 

At that point, it was just chaos. 

House Bill 1842 was looming. Houston ISD leaders knew, starting in the spring of 2015, that we were at risk of sanctions in the fall of 2018. In 2017, the legislature had passed a policy giving districts two options to avoid those sanctions: improve the campus in question or close it. By 2018, we had a third option, and that was to find a partner. 

A lot of districts around the state, like San Antonio, saw the writing on the wall and took action. Dr. Grenita Lathan, our chief academic officer at the time, had a very well thought-out plan how to address our chronically underperforming campuses 鈥� not just the ones that were going to trigger sanctions, but the ones that were on the runway coming up to the trigger point. 

There were community meetings to help impacted schools understand what the recommendations were going to be, but they basically got shut down by a small, vocal community of people who didn’t like whatever the recommendation was for a given school. They didn’t want their school consolidated. They didn’t want to close it, didn’t want to partner. So none of it ever happened.

We were eventually presented with a potential partner for the schools that were going to trigger sanctions later that year. We never voted on it. The meeting got out of control. People were arrested. We made . And we did nothing. We were the only district in the state, to my knowledge, that did nothing. 

I remember talking, when we first triggered the law in 2019, to somebody who had testified in favor of House Bill 1842 in 2015. He said, “Well, we never imagined that this would happen in HISD.” I said, “Because you thought they鈥檇 give us a path out?” And he said, “No, because I thought you guys would do what you needed to do to avoid it.”

We had the opportunity, and we didn’t. We interfered with the leaders that we entrusted to bring us good recommendations. We shut it down.

Do you think the things Lathan proposed would have made a difference?

If the board had supported Grenita despite the noise, and if there were real and meaningful community engagement. Grenita and her team could have worked with these communities: 鈥淗ey, we’re going to do a closure, or a restart. What do you want school to look like? What are your hopes and dreams for your children?鈥� I think if the board had stood behind her on that, our story today would be very, very different. Student achievement would have increased. And I don’t think we would be in a position where we’d have a board of managers coming in. 

When the board decided not to endorse the plan that the interim superintendent brought forward, was there an alternate plan? 

You’re presuming nine people, plus at that point in time a superintendent, were all having constructive conversations together about a plan? I don’t think you should make that presumption. 

I was actually called the day [after the fractious April 2018 meeting] by somebody else who asked whether, if they come back next week with a partnership with another organization, would I support it? I said, I’m not going to vote for that. There needs to be a bigger, more comprehensive student-centered plan here.

This is about improving the learning outcomes for students in a way that is equitable. My objective wasn’t to save the board.

Between 2018 and now, were there more efforts to come up with an improvement plan, or was the idea to just wait for the suit to work its way through the courts?

We’ve had a lot of inconsistency in administrative leadership. We had a longstanding superintendent, Terry Grier, who left two years before I got on the board. We had an interim for a few months. We had Richard Carranza. We had Grenita as interim superintendent for 3陆 years after that. We have all the battles between different factions of the board, including the ] and appointed somebody else one day, triggering a special accreditation investigation with the state. We came finally to the other side of that and hired Millard House, who’s now been here for a year and a half. At this point, me and Elizabeth Santos are the senior board members, and we’ve only been here for five years. 

So you don’t have a lot of continuity. Which in one way was good, because in 2020, when we had four new board members and I was board chair, I’m like, we’re going to double down on governance and build a foundation and figure out where we’re trying to go so that when we hire somebody to take us there, we’ve got a plan. 

We have board members who wanted to see large-scale, systemic changes in our incredibly large, diverse and complex system. Who can see the opportunities that exist, can see where inequities exist. Your board and your superintendent don’t have to agree on everything, right? I actually think you have to have diversity of thought. But you have to have everybody centered around a core set of beliefs and values on where you’re trying to go. And we have that on paper. But I don’t feel that we’ve ever as a board been partners in that work, and certainly not our superintendent.

We just got stuck. We’re grounded in this governance model, but we weren’t seeing things come from the administration that were really challenging the status quo of what an education system can and should look like for children 鈥� and almost a quarter of a way through the 21st century. 

There’s some irony there. You had an interim superintendent who had put deep thought into systemic change and a board that wouldn’t sign off. And then you ended up with a board that wanted change but an administration that wouldn’t advance a plan. When the Texas Supreme Court decided to lift the injunction, the board had the option of continuing with the suit, as unlikely as victory seemed. But you voted not to do that. 

I’m going to say this for me, because I don’t want to speak for my colleagues on this. There’s a saying: When the elephants fight, the grass suffers. We have been in an adversarial relationship with our state agency in some ways since before I was on the board, before we even triggered 1842.

I think there was a realization that we were unlikely to win. We could either move forward in a collaborative, student-centered way or we could continue to fight. For me personally, I made a commitment to always put students first. I don’t believe that the outcome would change if we persist in this legal battle. It prolongs a period of instability for our kids.

What matters most is, how do we make sure kids are learning and growing with the least amount of disruption we possibly could have? I’ve always believed that with all of what our district has gone through in the past five years, there has to be something better for kids on the other side of it all. And how do we get to that better other side as quickly and harmlessly as we possibly can? If it’s even possible.

If the appointed board of managers and new superintendent are going to succeed, they鈥檙e going to need community support. And at the moment, there’s still a lot of shrieking.

Our public school system belongs to the public. We want the kids who have been left behind for far too long to no longer be left behind. That is a shared value between our current district governance team of 10, our board and superintendent, and our state [education] agency and therefore, presumably, . That’s a shared value.

The divergence is going to be how that is achieved. On a Saturday afternoon, not at rush hour, it takes an hour to drive from one side of Houston ISD to the other. When you go from east to west, you’re going from oil and gas plants, the shipping channel with tankers coming in and out and all of that, to the west side. That’s also oil and gas 鈥� but in shining office buildings. 

If this group can come in, understand the diversity of need and build true partnership and collaboration with communities in their pursuit of systemic changes, I think they’ll be successful. If they come in thinking they have all the answers and they’re just going to put all these things in place, nothing’s going to really be different for kids. 

It’s all about making decisions with families. That’s where the magic can happen. And we haven’t done that.

What happens to you now? You’re still an elected board member, but you don’t have any power as of June 1. Do you have ceremonial duties? 

I don’t know. I think so. Keep in mind our state agency has overseen the transition to a board of managers in other districts before. But we’re the biggest. This is not something that one new superintendent and nine appointed board members are going to be able to do on their own as quickly as they’re going to need to ramp up. They’re going to need help being introduced to the community as something other than, you know, agents of a conspiracy. 

When you have an elected board, you have people 鈥� especially if they’re viable to win 鈥� who have relationships and roots in a community. And who build more through the campaign process, through the different civic clubs they visit with, the doors they knock on and all of that. As you build these relationships, you build an understanding of the fabric of the community. 

The board of managers, they’re going from 0 to 100 while skipping that process. I think there could be value in taking a second tier of candidates [for the board of managers who do not get appointed] and creating some kind of community council that helps support that appointed board.

I do believe in democratically elected governance of public systems and public dollars. But I also know that at least in our state, long before HB 1842 came into existence, there was a process supported by both Republicans and Democrats. As a school board, you have independence from other governmental entities. But if, in cases of financial impropriety, legal malfeasance and student performance, if you’re not serving kids well, if you are engaging in behaviors that create a risk to children, then there’s going to be intervention. To make sure that kids are learning and growing and that the dollars that you were trusted with are actually being spent on the children’s learning and growth.

I don’t know that there’s an easier right thing in that equation. It’s an imperfect democracy. We’ve known that since it started over 200 years ago. It’s all about how you just keep striving for something better within those values. 

Don’t let me push you off a cliff here, but I want to know how this feels. 

Back up before we get to that, because you’re going to lose me after that. We’re so big. We’re not a suburban district with a bunch of giant one-size-fits-all schools. We know one-size-fits-all doesn’t work for all kids and it doesn’t work for all families. 

We also know that money matters, but money not spent effectively doesn’t change outcomes. The unfortunate thing about the [COVID recovery] dollars is we’re probably going to learn that in a really harsh way in the coming years. How we chose to spend it actually either made a difference for kids or didn’t. 

But we’re stuck in this conversation where it’s just about more money. We need to evolve to new school design. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for traditional models for students for whom that works, but in a district like ours, with the number of buildings and students we have, there is absolutely room to try things out and to scale what we know works. That was always my vision. 

One of the most poignant stories from my early days of being on the board 鈥� I have all these kids鈥� faces in my head from visiting schools 鈥� was this little second-grader eagerly raising his hand in class. But he didn’t even have a teacher of record, he had a long-term sub. Is he going to be okay? 

I was visiting our disciplinary alternative education program, and I asked the school leader, 鈥淲hat鈥檚 your biggest challenge?鈥� He said, 鈥淭he kids are here for a certain number of days, so the first challenge we have is some kids start to self-sabotage so they don’t have to go back to their home school. The other challenge is kids that get back to their home school and self-sabotage so they can come back.鈥�

That’s kids telling us what they need, and we’re not listening. The families who have left our system for charter schools, private schools, to homeschool, they’ve done it because we’re not giving them something they want and need for their kids. And until we start talking to families in a real way, we’re not going to be able to build a holistic system that meets the needs of all kids, and we’re going to keep leaving kids behind. 

So how do I feel? Angry that I couldn’t achieve that. Disappointed that I couldn’t achieve that. We stole five years from kids. Five years where we could have given all our focus to the needs of students without the distraction of a lawsuit and all the impediments that instability has brought to our system. We should all be angry about that.