Representative Harold Dutton Jr. outside Wheatley High School, his alma mater, in Houston.Credit...William Chambers for The New York Times

Texas Is Taking Over Houston’s Schools, Prompting Charges of Racism

A takeover of the state’s largest school district has led to lawsuits and accusations that minority voters are being ignored. At the center of it are a majority-black high school and a member of the Class of 1961.

HOUSTON — Harold V. Dutton Jr. was proud to have walked the same high school halls that Barbara Jordan, the first black woman elected to Congress from the South, did. Ms. Jordan graduated in 1951 from Houston’s Phillis Wheatley High School, a pillar for nearly a century in the Fifth Ward, one of Houston’s historic black neighborhoods.

Mr. Dutton, 74, graduated from Wheatley 10 years after Ms. Jordan and went on to become a lawyer and Democratic lawmaker in the state House of Representatives. He watched his old high school deteriorate as poverty spread through the Fifth Ward and grew increasingly frustrated by what he felt was a lack of urgency by local educators.

His solution has embroiled the city’s entire public school system in a bitter fight that has stirred legal, political and racial turmoil in the largest school district in Texas. This month, the state’s education commissioner informed the leaders of the Houston Independent School District that the state was taking it over, citing the repeated failing performance of Wheatley as one of the reasons.

Mr. Dutton opened the door to the takeover as the co-author of a law that created what education experts have called one of the harshest remedies in the country for troubled schools. Under its terms, any district that has even one school that consistently fails to meet state standards for five or more years must either shut the campus or face the possibility of a state takeover.

Though the Texas Legislature passed the law in 2015, it is only now being put to its biggest test, in Houston. The state takeover in Houston has put Mr. Dutton’s political career at risk and caused upheaval and uncertainty in one of the largest public-school systems in the country, a sprawling bureaucracy with 200,000 students and more than 12,000 teachers in 280 schools.

Should an entire district be penalized for the chronic low performance of one majority-black school in one of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods? And can Texas education officials — who were found in a federal investigation last year to have illegally denied therapy, tutoring and counseling to tens of thousands of children with disabilities — be trusted to do any better?

No one agrees on the answers. And Mr. Dutton remains unapologetic about the outcome.

“One of the highest forms of child abuse is to kill a child’s future by not educating them, and when you do that, it just seems to me there ought to be a punishment,” said Mr. Dutton, who likened the move by state authorities to the actions of the state’s Child Protective Services in cases of abused children.

“Some are saying, ‘How can one campus be bad and cause the whole district to be taken over?’” he said. “Well, I explain it to them this way. If you have five kids and you’re abusing one of them, and C.P.S. comes to your house, they don’t leave the other four kids there. They take the one who’s being abused, and the others as well.”

The long-running debate over a looming takeover has led to lawsuits, shouting matches and arrests at chaotic public meetings and heightened hostility between Hispanic and black parents and officials. Greg Abbott, the state’s Republican governor, weighed in on Twitter earlier this year, calling the leadership of the Houston school district “a disaster.”

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The long-running debate over a looming takeover has led to heated public meetings.Credit...Allison Hess for The New York Times
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Lucia Moreno expressed her frustration at one of the meetings.Credit...Allison Hess for The New York Times

“Their self-centered ineptitude has failed the children they are supposed to educate,” he wrote. He added that “if ever there was a school board that needs to be taken over and reformed, it’s H.I.S.D.,” the governor wrote.

The state’s shifting politics have played a role in the debate. A few years ago, Republican officials in Texas had a single opponent to unite them — President Barack Obama and his administration’s liberal policies. Since President Trump was elected, Republicans have found a new villain to rally against — the state’s largest cities.

While Republicans run state government, major cities like Houston are largely dominated by Democrats. Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and other large cities have often joined Houston in fighting the state in court on everything from paid sick leave to plastic-bag bans. Republicans in state government who have long preached an anti-big-government mantra are in turn inserting themselves into local issues, including Mr. Abbott’s recent focus on homeless encampments in Austin.

“It’s a desperate means to maintain control that I think many in the Republican Party feel is slipping away in the state of Texas,” said Zeph Capo, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, a union representing teachers and other district employees that is seeking to join a federal lawsuit filed by the school board to block the takeover.

The Fifth Ward is a proud but struggling neighborhood about three miles northeast of downtown Houston, across Buffalo Bayou. It has been a focal point of black Texas — the former home of the boxer George Foreman, the rap group the Geto Boys and Mickey Leland, who filled Ms. Jordan’s seat in Congress after she retired — but has in recent years become increasingly Hispanic.

More than 800 students attend Wheatley now — 53 percent are black and 46 percent are Hispanic. Nearly 94 percent of students are economically disadvantaged. In August, the school failed to meet state academic standards for the seventh consecutive year. Another Fifth Ward school, the long-struggling Kashmere High School, met state standards for the first time in more than a decade, leaving the focus of chronic low performance on Wheatley.

Many black parents and students are opposed to a state takeover and fear that state officials will appoint a board that will seek to close Wheatley or turn it into a charter school.

Some believe the state bureaucracy is too big and ineffective to carry out a turnaround of Wheatley. But many have also lost confidence in the local school board, particularly after the board’s four Hispanic trustees were found by state investigators to have illegally met and coordinated to replace the African-American interim superintendent. Still, there is support for a takeover among some African-American families.

Teachers’ union leaders and other takeover critics said the dynamics at play in Houston were about far more than fixing Wheatley.

They dispute the state’s depiction of the district as dysfunctional, when it earned an overall grade of B for the last school year under the state’s rating system. They point to problems with past state interventions, and they believe the takeover in Houston was prompted by racism and a conservative agenda to turn public schools into charter schools. Across the district, 62 percent of the students are Hispanic and 24 percent are black. The nine-member school board is made up of four Hispanics, three African-Americans, one white and one Asian.

All of the troubled school districts that have been subject to a variety of state interventions in Texas in recent years have been majority-minority districts. The plan to appoint a board of managers in Houston to replace the elected school board was announced Nov. 6, only a day after voters elected new school-board trustees, a move that opponents said disenfranchised minority voters and violated the Voting Rights Act.

“Texas has a long history of disenfranchisement of people of color, and this is just part of it,” said Jose Garza, a longtime voting rights lawyer who is representing the teachers’ union.

Around the country, there have been more than 100 state takeovers of school districts since 1989, and those with predominantly nonwhite school boards have historically been more likely to be taken over, according to Domingo Morel, author of a book on the subject and a political scientist at Rutgers University, Newark.

“The rise of Latino political power in places like Texas poses a threat to the existing state power, which is dominated by Republicans in the governorship and State Legislature,” Professor Morel said. “Schools and school boards serve as the foundation for political empowerment for communities.”

Republicans say the state’s involvement in Houston schools has nothing to do with politics, charter schools or racial discrimination, and everything to do with district mismanagement. The state education commissioner, Mike Morath, wrote in announcing the takeover that the board of trustees “is unable to govern the district, as demonstrated by its inability to address the longstanding academic deficiencies at Wheatley High School.”

Mr. Dutton has angered some in his own party for his role in prompting the takeover.

Some Democrats say Mr. Dutton, who has sponsored pro-charter-school legislation, is in league with charter-school proponents. One of the ways the Houston district could have avoided a takeover was by forming a partnership with a nonprofit group, charter school or university, but district leaders voted against it.

At a recent community meeting about the takeover, one of the loudest rounds of applause came after a woman stood up and called for someone to run against Mr. Dutton and remove him from office.

Mr. Dutton, one of the longest-serving lawmakers in the state House, shrugged off any potential political blowback, and also any claims of voting-rights violations.

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Mr. Dutton spoke with Patricia Jones, a fellow Wheatley graduate, in Houston.Credit...William Chambers for The New York Times
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Wheatley High School in the Fifth Ward neighborhood of Houston is at the center of the divisive takeover.Credit...William Chambers for The New York Times

“If I had a choice between disenfranchising voters and disenfranchising children, I’m going to side with the children first,” Mr. Dutton said. “And if H.I.S.D. had wanted it to be any different, what could they done? Fix the damn school. That’s what they could have done.”

On Monday, Mr. Dutton walked to the entrance of Wheatley’s auditorium, one of the few parts of the old campus that he and Ms. Jordan attended that were preserved after new buildings were erected.

Mr. Dutton recalled a moment, back in 2002, that played a role in his interest in improving Wheatley. For an event honoring the school’s 75th anniversary, he was looking over the biographies of students who had won an honorary Miss Wheatley title. Many of the early Miss Wheatleys became teachers, and received masters’ degrees and Ph.D.’s, he said. By the late 1980s, he said, he saw a decline in their achievements, and found one former Miss Wheatley working at McDonald’s.

“I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with the students, but there’s simply something wrong with what we’re giving them,” he said.

Dana Goldstein contributed reporting from New York.

Manny Fernandez is the Houston bureau chief, covering Texas and Oklahoma. He joined The Times as a Metro reporter in 2005, covering the Bronx and housing. He previously worked for The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle. More about Manny Fernandez

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Takeover of Schools Stirs Turmoil in Houston. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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