Dive Brief:

• Two bills aimed at improving schools are now being considered by Michigan's legislature; the first includes $500 million in debt relief, continued state control of the district, and new restrictions on teacher bargain contracts and strikes; the second removes state control and creates a Detroit Education Commission with decision-making authority.
• Only a reported 4% of eighth-grade students in Detroit Public Schools (DPS) can read and perform math at grade level, pointing to the system's ineffectiveness not only with managing its finances, but with teaching students.
• Now, a conference committee has been tasked with trying to mesh the two proposals, blending them into one compromise. 

Dive Insight:

Cities like Chicago should pay close attention to the situation currently unfolding in Detroit Public Schools, if they hope to avoid the kind of legislative collision that policymakers are now wrangling with regarding DPS. In Chicago, a report from the Illinois State Board of Education staff recently found the financial situation of CPS not bad enough to warrant a state takeover, though criteria could be met in the upcoming school year. CPS officials are mostly opposed to a state takeover. Instead, they're asking for a restructuring of the CPS funding formula.

Critics are divided over the efficacy of state takeovers, and recent research has proven that closing down drop-out factories and poorly performing schools helps students improve. Atlanta is also considering a takeover, and schools in Little Rock, AR remain under state control, despite lawsuits that have tried to wrest control back to the local level. It's not yet clear whether the state takeover there was successful. 

In Tennessee, state takeovers have proven less effective than an innovative turnaround approach known as I-Zone, which stands for "innovation zone." There, the Shelby County School District, which houses Memphis, was found to be home to 80% of the worst-ranked schools in Tennessee in 2013. iZone, schools exist as a locally-led alternative to the state's Achievement School District takeover schools. All but one of the six schools in the ASD’s first cohort remain ranked in the bottom 5% after five years. Research has found that state takeovers of struggling schools and districts disproportionately harm black and Latino communities.