What Research Tells Us About School Takeovers

BY STEVE NUZUM

On July 10, 2025, Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver and the South Carolina Department of Education announced their intent to take over the finances of Marlboro Schools. The State Board of Education voted unanimously to allow the takeover to move forward this week. While the financial picture in the district is somewhat complex, South Carolina education supporters should consider what research has told us about school takeovers, in general, as well as the results of past takeovers in our state.

What drives takeovers?

A few years back, education professor and school takeover researcher Domingo Morel told EdWeek, “If takeovers were happening [solely] because districts are struggling, we would have many more takeovers than we do.” 

The piece continues, “Other factors that precipitate takeovers, Morel has found, include school boards whose members mostly are people of color and court rulings ordering states to supply more funding to schools with large shares of students with high needs.”

Similarly, the authors of a recent research paper on school takeovers found that Black and Latino districts were more likely to be taken over by states than majority White districts, even when they had equivalent “academic performance”. A study cited by the authors also found that, “state takeovers of majority-Black districts have been followed by a decrease in the representation of African Americans in local government.”

According to a 2023 report in the South Carolina Post and Courier, “The number of school districts taken over by state education departments has increased exponentially in recent years. As of 2016, takeovers were happening at nearly twice the rate they had in the previous decade. Most of the takeovers were of districts where the majority of the population is Black.” 

South Carolina Department of Education demographics data shows that school districts currently under state control, including Williamsburg and Allendale, fit this pattern, with numbers of Black students that significantly exceed the portion of Black residents in the state.

The Post and Courier also reported that in the 1990s, when the state took over Allendale schools as its first foray into taking over a local district, “Allendale County residents, many of whom were low-income and Black, accused the state of colonization.”

What are the common impacts of state takeovers?

In general, the authors of the paper found that the process of state takeovers “appears to be disruptive in the early years of takeover, particularly to English Language Arts achievement, although the longer-term effects are less clear.”

As Brookings reported, “State takeovers, on average, do not improve student academic performance in math or reading. In fact, evidence suggests that they were disruptive to reading achievement in the early years of reform”.

Allendale’s local board temporarily regained control of the district in 2007 after its test scores initially improved, but scores declined afterwards and the state has maintained control of the district off and on ever since. 

While the problems driving Allendale’s apparent underperformance (which include the fact that South Carolina primarily measures school performance using test scores that its own Education Oversight Committee has at times found to be racially biased) are complex, it is noteworthy that, statewide, 2005-2007 also saw the last significant stretch of years in which the state legislature did not underfund state schools under the definition in the state’s Education Finance Act law. 

State takeovers in South Carolina have happened in predominately poor, majority-minority districts.

Allendale, which has the third-highest rate of students in poverty of any South Carolina school district, according to the State Report Card, receives over half of its total revenue from the state. Similarly, Williamsburg has the state’s fourth highest poverty index, and the third-highest percentage of Black students. Marlboro, which the state intends to take over next, serves a largely majority-Black student population, and, like Allendale, gets the majority of its funding from the state.

In other words, it seems irresponsible to ignore the likely role of state-level underfunding in districts whose supposed “failures” have been used to justify state takeovers. This is particularly relevant since takeovers disproportionately affect poor, majority minority districts, and, in the case of districts like Allendale, don’t seem to leave communities with much to show for their loss of local control. And the state is, itself, directly responsible for passing legislation like Act 388, which significantly limits the ability of local districts to raise revenue in the first place.

Maybe if the state were to adequately fund these “failing” districts, it would never have to take them over in the first place. 

But since South Carolina has never consistently funded schools even at the fairly modest levels required by the 1977 Education Finance Act, we can’t really know.

School takeover researchers reported in Brookings that , “takeovers led to increased state revenues and expenditures per pupil in the targeted districts, primarily by increasing payments on legacy costs (employee benefits and debt retirement). In doing so, takeovers appear to have improved district budgetary and long-run solvency, on average.”  It’s possible that the improvements the state saw in Allendale schools during its pre-2007 takeover period were due to better funding, and that when the state briefly returned local control, it did so at the cost of that funding. 

Political motivations.

And as the office of the state superintendent has become more and more heavily politicized-- with current Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver explicitly wading deeply into racialized rhetoric by partnering with PragerU and limiting student access to the AP African American Studies course while repeatedly declaiming “woke nonsense”-- I’m concerned that the use of the state’s takeover powers may also become more politically motivated. 

While Allendale, for example, may very well be experiencing problems that require state oversight, it’s difficult to imagine a state takeover of, say, Greenville County schools, where White students make up the largest subgroup (at around 47%, according to the most recent SC Department of Education numbers), no matter what the district’s test scores might be in the future. After all, a revolt by parents in that part of the state, many of whom are affluent and politically-connected, and who are part of a much larger group of families (Greenville has around 77,000 students, while Allendale has fewer than a thousand) would be significant. Allendale, in comparison, is fairly defenseless against incursions by the state, whether those are justified or not. 

Previous superintendents of education have, of course, made sometimes-compelling claims about the inefficiency of very small districts, but coming from the current regime in South Carolina, Weaver’s argument that Marlboro, for example, should fire staff in order to balance its budget, feels  somewhat opportunistic. Weaver has, after all, argued explicitly for rural, “faith-based micro schools” and has often supported school voucher legislation that forbids much, if any, regulation by state entities. So it’s difficult to believe she sees state bureaucracy as an end to improving schools, as much as a useful political tool for highlighting the perceived horrors of poor, majority-minority, small, and rural public schools in order to strengthen the sales pitch for government-funded “alternatives”. 

Where we go from here.

While there seems to be disagreement among Marlboro’s staff and Board as to the roots of the district’s current financial predicament, and while at least some members of the district seem to welcome state intervention, it’s also important that the public watch closely to make sure that as the state takes over Marlboro’s finances, it so in a way that actually helps to address the underlying problems, rather than simply use the district as a test case in a convenient narrative for the pro-voucher movement. 

For what it’s worth, some researchers, like Morel, and school advocates, have supported plans that provide local officials with guidance and resources to help address problems. 

“‘Takeover’ is saying the local community is incapable of supporting their own students, and we need to remove them from the equation,” Morel said in the EdWeek piece. “If we really are interested in improving school districts, there are ways for states to support local communities that get them away from this idea of takeover.”

What they’re envisioning might be more like the consolidation incentives South Carolina has sometimes provided to local school districts that it feels are too small to run efficiently. As the Post and Courier reported, “What legislators approved in 2019 was a carrot-and-stick approach for poor districts of fewer than 1,500 students: Come up with your own plan to merge and apply for a piece of the money or risk legislators doing it later without the cash.” 

Ultimately, all but one of the eleven districts which consolidated into five did so at least somewhat voluntarily, and were presumably able to make decisions as local communities about how to share and consolidate resources, and about who to hire and fire, rather than having those decisions dictated by officials in Columbia.