Racial Composition of School District on School Leaders’ Responses to State Takeover: A Field Experiment on the Application of Michigan’s Emergency Manager Law

Abstract

Michigan’s Public Act 436, commonly referred to as the Emergency Manager Law, has provided for state installed emergency managers to oversee financially distressed municipalities as well as school districts. Given that a number of Michigan school districts, suburban, rural, and urban, have been operating at a deficit for several years and yet only the financial status of majority Black school districts (Detroit, Highland Park, Muskegon Heights) have triggered this takeover law, this field experiment investigated the effect of school district's racial composition on both the level of support for state-installed emergency managers in districts and the level of support for politically material resistance to the application of that remedy. Implications regarding policy and critical policy research are forwarded in light of the results.

DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2017.v7n2p31