State Intervention and Racialized Policy Aversion in Michigan's Black School Districts

For the past thirty years, Michigan has used Emergency Management (EM) and receiverships to solve city and school finance issues. The impact of these state intervention policies has been highly publicized and has led to institutional distrust among black citizens in urban communities —with the Flint water crisis standing out as the most infamous and high-profile example. A possible outcome of local distrust of state leadership is stakeholder resistance to state intervention across policy sectors and among policies that are perceived as beneficial and less contentious. This paper examines the Michigan Partnership Model (PM) – a state intervention policy that uses partnerships to turnaround the state’s lowest performing schools – to examine how adverse policy experiences shape school accountability aversion in Urban Cities. Under the PM, some school districts that previously experienced Emergency Management can work collaboratively with the state to improve education performance. This paper examines how policy visibility and prior, negative policy experiences (e.g., emergency financial management) shape perceptions of new policy. First, I used an analysis of local news media to compare the visibility and discourse of the EM and PM policies. Second, I use interviews with stakeholders in Michigan schools with and without historical accounts of state intervention to gauge whether past experiences with EM policy impacts stakeholder’s trust in partnership agreements. I find that stakeholders with EM experiences have more negative views of the state – not the PM itself. However, I do find that visibility plays a role in stakeholders’ knowledge and subsequent aversion toward the PM policy.