Stealing From the Hand You Bit: The Complex Context of Post-Milliken Detroit Schools. Terah Talei Venzant Chambers, John Yun (Michigan State University)
We take up the call of “revitalizing education in complex contexts” in metropolitan Detroit. We use descriptive statistics and interviews with Detroit-area school leaders to examine Michigan’s Proposal A (school choice) law given the legacy of the 1974 Supreme Court decision in Milliken v. Bradley. Ironically, many districts that actively resisted desegregation under Milliken are now actively recruiting Black students from Detroit, resulting in the very desegregation targeted by the overturned metropolitan busing plan.
An Examination of Urban School Governance Reform in Detroit Public Schools, 1999–2014. Shaun Black; Michael Owens, California Lutheran University
Using Portz and Schwartz’s (2009) institutional progress framework developed from their study on Boston Public Schools’ turnaround in the 1990s and 2000s, we examined the decline of Detroit Public Schools (DPS). The paper proposes a paradigm for reframing the study of educational systems and educational policies in cities. The institutional progress framework provides insights into leadership, educational programs, nances, personnel, community support, and political support that characterized DPS’s decline in the period studied.
Deconstitutionalization of Urban Districts and Leaders’ Political Response: A Field Experiment on Michigan’s EM Law. Maiyoua Vang, California State University, Sacramento
While a number of Michigan school districts have been operating at a deficit, only the nancial status of majority-Black school districts (most notably Detroit Public Schools) has triggered State Emergency Management (EM). This eld experiment investigated the effect of school district’s racial composition on both the level of support for EM of districts and the level of commitment to politically material resistance from school leadership to the application of that remedy.
