Roxanne Martinez moved back to her neighborhood in Fort Worth so her kids could attend the same schools she did.

The mother of two was on the booster club. And on a walk one day with students to a polling location — she’s always encouraged civic involvement — one asked her why she hadn’t run for school board. That question sparked a campaign, and she was elected in 2021.

But the board seat Martinez won in the Fort Worth Independent School District may not come with any power for very much longer. Texas education officials announced in October that they would take control of the district and replace locally elected board members with a board hand-picked by the state, a move triggered by the academic failures at a school that has since closed.

“I take parent calls almost every night, almost every day, and so to lose that local voice, removing the voice of my constituents, of our voters, is just deeply concerning to me,” she said.

State takeovers are having a moment. For decades, state officials have taken over school districts, citing academic and financial calamity. In some cases, the calamity was real: School districts were bankrupt. Very small fractions of students read at grade level. But while those reasons are still the most commonly cited, officials’ rhetoric to justify the tactic has become more overtly political as the country’s political divides have deepened, according to those who study the phenomenon.

In Texas, the state has seized control over seven school districts since 2023, four of those announced in the past six months. Nationwide, Chalkbeat tracked at least 21 new school district takeovers in the past three years, with additional takeovers threatened. These come after what some experts said was a lull in the practice. This year already, Texas’ schools chief , while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took a swipe at unions while .

“At this point, states don’t really care about having to justify this action,” said Domingo Morel, a professor at New York University. “Back in the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s, states really went out of their way to make it look like they really wanted to come in to improve the district.”

Conservative governors and education commissioners have said they’re taking a hard line on academics, targeting entire districts over a few schools, or progress they say is not fast enough.

Some argue that outside intervention is the only way to break up entrenched political interests that stagnate learning. Researchers also say the revival of takeovers in some states may reflect alarm over flagging academic achievement and financial distress in COVID’s wake.

“People are really concerned, especially post-pandemic, about student achievement,” said Josh Bleiberg, an education professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “I do think there’s an emergency mindset aspect of here like, ‘well, we’ve got to do something.’”

There are examples of takeovers that , but they are the minority, according to research. More often, research shows the loss of control disproportionately affects communities of color in exchange for meager and short-term gains in academic achievement.

Some welcome change in the Fort Worth district, where . For others, like Martinez, the takeover is a flex of Republican political power over a district in , and in a school district that primarily serves Hispanic and Black students. To them, the entity that will come out ahead could be the state’s new private school choice program, not public schools.

And for a third set — people like Ale Checka, a longtime teacher in Fort Worth — two things can be true.

Yes, Fort Worth’s schools deserved to be taken over, Checka said. But that doesn’t mean she likes it: “God, I wish we could get taken over by literally anybody else.”

State takeovers gaining momentum in Republican-led states

States run by Democrats have , in several instances for financial reasons. But Republican-led states are leading the charge on recent takeovers, although the strategy looks different from state to state.

In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers want to install a state-appointed oversight board in Memphis-Shelby County Schools, the largest school district in the state, .

Tennessee Republicans argue a state-appointed oversight board could better turn around lagging academic achievement than the current school board. Opponents of the GOP plan say Memphis schools are not only improving, they’re

has taken over two school districts in the past year, after a lull since 2021. The state has had broader authority since 2024, when lawmakers removed a requirement for the governor to first declare a state of emergency in a school district to initiate a takeover.

GOP leaders in and are pushing takeovers for more state control over local districts.

Not all recent state interventions in local school districts amount to a direct takeover. Indiana GOP lawmakers have , but the board’s members would be picked by the mayor, who’s currently a Democrat.

But the state that’s arguably become the clearest blueprint for the current crop of takeovers is Texas.

In Texas, just one school in a district can trigger state intervention for that district. In Houston, the trigger was Wheatley High School where more than 90% of Wheatley’s students are Latino or Black and many are from low-income backgrounds.

Wheatley was deemed unacceptable in the state’s rating system for seven straight school years, which state schools chief Mike Morath , along with languishing achievement in other Houston schools, which educate about 180,000 students and constitute the state’s largest district.

In 2023, Morath was necessary in part because the district had allowed chronic low achievement in multiple schools for far too long.

“Parents, teachers have high expectations for kids,” Morath said at the time. “It’s important for me to maintain high expectations for school boards. So this is ultimately about an intervention action for the school board.” (The Texas Education Agency did not respond to requests for an interview with Morath for this story.)

State officials put Mike Miles — a longtime lightning rod in education — in charge of Houston as superintendent and replaced the elected board with an appointed one. Miles, the former Dallas superintendent who also founded a charter school network, made school hours longer, , , and .

The results have been a mixed bag. Houston now has fewer struggling schools, under Texas’ school rating system. But the number of students enrolled . And the share of teachers remaining on their campuses between school years fell from 70% before the takeover to 58.6% from the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years, according to .

Still, Houston has produced enticing results. “People from all over the country, including Alaska, are calling us to ask how we’re doing this,” Miles told The 74 last year, touting the district’s academic gains. “Boldness is what’s called for, and people are starting to have some hope that big turnarounds can be done.”

Republicans in Tennessee of Memphis’ district, critical of flagging academics and school board dysfunction.

Parents and teachers in Fort Worth, a district of roughly 70,000 students and the 10th-largest in the state, have eyed the changes in Houston closely.

, according to the Fort Worth Report. Two middle schools , just shy of the state intervention threshold.

Trenace Dorsey-Hollins is a Fort Worth mother of two and founder of Parent Shield, a grassroots group pushing the message that Fort Worth’s kids deserve a high-quality education.

Despite the political undertones of the takeover in Houston, the new management is “changing the trajectory for a lot of kids” there, she said, and Fort Worth is in need of some “true momentum.”

The truth is, many schools across Texas are failing, and they’ve been failing kids for a long time, she said.

Checka acknowledged that Fort Worth is in a literacy crisis that warrants outside intervention, she said. But she’s watched Houston eliminate school librarian positions with horror.

“The moves that the state is making are not moves that are for literacy,” Checka said. While Houston has improved reading scores, educators have been critical of.

Martinez, the board member, notes that the district already adopted higher-quality instructional materials and added teacher training. Just this month, .

“If the state had some magic bullet that was going to just come in and significantly improve schools, one: why haven’t they already shared it?” she asked. “Two: why are they not partnering with us?”

Political rhetoric around school district takeovers has changed

As students walked out earlier this year to protest federal immigration policy, Texas Education Agency officials warned that .

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott called for investigations into multiple districts, implying that protests were taking kids away from academics.

Texas hasn’t initiated any takeovers since Abbott’s comments. But the state did place the Austin district under investigation. Austin was , and several middle schools are one failing grade away from triggering intervention.

Morel, who studies state takeovers, said he believed the country would witness a decline in the practice nearly a decade ago.

Yet Houston marked an “outright political power play on the part of the state,” given that the state used a single school’s shortcomings as the reason for intervention, even when the district itself was not failing in the state’s rating system.

“You can anticipate that if this type of trajectory continues, that it’s really not about improving schools, that it’s about undermining the political power of these communities,” he said.

There’s inherent political friction in a takeover, said Johnny Key, a former Republican Arkansas schools chief who oversaw the state intervention in the Little Rock School District from 2015 to 2021. Key acknowledges the takeover wasn’t a “smashing success” but said it stabilized leadership and helped the district plan for the end of desegregation aid, a major funding source.

Key said any takeover is inherently political, because the state is claiming responsibility for something typically controlled locally. But that doesn’t mean takeovers aren’t necessary, or that state officials are simply dismissing communities.

“To paint state takeover with any type of broad brush ignores the nuance and the differences in the communities that are affected,” he said.

But ultimately state takeovers must be sensitive to politics and get support from key groups, including teachers, to ensure changes can endure, said Ashley Jochim, a political scientist with the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

“You go in and do a bunch of stuff that’s super controversial, even if it benefits kids, if it doesn’t have political support, it’s not going to be sustained over time,” she said.

Recent controversy over Texas education policy isn’t confined to state takeovers. In conversations about the pending Fort Worth takeover, Martinez and others raised Texas’ .

There’s no evidence to suggest Texas is somehow using state intervention as a way to promote vouchers. But critics like Martinez are skeptical of a government touting a , while also claiming it’s trying to raise achievement for already-stretched public schools.

“The reasoning behind the strong interventions has less to do about student outcomes and more about shifting of power,” Martinez said.

For Checka, the state’s motivation for taking over Fort Worth Schools matters. The idea that students will learn more every day is what gets her up in the morning. She wishes she felt confident Texas officials had the same motivations.

“The things that are important to me are my students being able to read and write … my students being able to access opportunities after high school and go to college,” she said. “It is just not important to them.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

“Again in the shelter.”

“They are shooting the airport.”

“Our airport.”  

Hulievska, 19 and a freshman at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, came to the United States from Ukraine last year through an organization meant to help students from low-income families attend top-tier universities around the world. She hopes to major in creative writing and chose America for its diversity, which she believes will strengthen her craft.

She’s just one of from Ukraine living in the United States. Many have struggled to balance their studies with painful images from home, including possible

Hulievska’s move across the globe meant new opportunities, but also that she would leave behind her mother, father, two younger siblings, ages 13 and 7, and maternal grandmother. They’ve spent the past few days climbing in and out of a community shelter meant to ensure their safety as bombs slam into their home town of Zaporizhzhia, eight and a half hours southeast of Kyiv.

The town is of particular interest to occupying forces because it contains a nuclear power station, Hulievska said: Russian troops have been encroaching for days. They’ve already taken over her paternal grandmother’s village. The elderly woman no longer leaves her home.

The first time Hulievska’s family told her they were fleeing their apartment, she crumbled.

“I honestly started crying straight away,” she said, adding that her parents tried to soften the news by sending a selfie of them smiling in the shelter, telling her everything was OK.

 It helped, at least a little, she said. But a daughter worries.

“Your mind starts to imagine all kinds of bad things,” she said.

����������Ա�’s in this David and Goliath battle has won hearts around the world, with college students across the United States, , showing their support for the beleaguered nation through protests and fundraisers.

The fighting has been brutal with bodies strewn throughout the capital city of Kyiv. Local authorities say Ukrainians are already dead. Residents hiding in their basements or in area shelters, buoyed by the international support, say they hope their military and civilian army can prevent a takeover. Some have fled the country since the fighting broke out a week ago.

Peace talks have faltered but international economic pressure on Russia could force the nation to reconsider as the ruble, Vice President Kamala Harris said,

Hulievska is no expert on international politics, she said, but believes her country will stand for a few days more, adding it’s heart wrenching to watch the conflict unfold from afar. She thought she’d be able to focus on her studies through the crisis but learned, in recent days, that she has limits.

“Right now, whenever I do some work, it just feels so meaningless,” she said. “I stopped caring about grades. It’s a totally different type of thinking.”

But it’s not just Ukrainian-born students who are agitated to the point of distraction. William Risch, a history professor at Georgia College in Milledgeville, has many ties to the country: Not only did he live there for four years, but a who studied at Risch’s school in 2017 is now head of a territorial defense battalion defending the airport at Vasylkiv, a strategic site Russian forces have been .

Risch is heartsick at the thought of the inquisitive young man in the throes of combat, unsure if he is alive or dead. He remembers the student coming to his office to talk about Ukrainian politics, expressing skepticism over the country’s future.

The professor, whose areas of study include ​​Russia, the Soviet Union and central Europe, was surprised to learn he had taken up arms though many of Risch’s professional contacts in Ukraine, including a lawyer and a historian with no prior military experience, have already done the same.

Risch fears for all of them.   

“There is nothing else I can say,” he said. “Sometimes I just feel sick.”

Yana Annette Lysenko, 27 and working toward a Ph.D. in comparative literature and Slavic studies at New York University, shares his concern.

Though she was born in the United States, she visited Ukraine nearly every summer in her youth and continued to travel there into her adulthood. She left the country just two months ago with plans to return: She came back to the States only to find a subletter for her Queens apartment.

Much of Lysenko’s extended family remains in the country. An aunt, uncle and cousin recently fled from Kyiv.

Adding to her anguish, her Ukrainian boyfriend might soon join the fighting.

“I have loved ones at stake, their safety, well-being — everything is on the line,” she said. “It’s a lot of grief of sitting and having no clue what will happen.”

There was, at the time she left Ukraine, some speculation that Russia could attack, but the invasion still came as a surprise. Lysenko has had a hard time focusing ever since Russian troops entered the country.

“Work has taken a back seat to this,” she said. “Every time I go on to the internet, I see new updates, buildings being bombed, cities I’ve been to and have seen in real life. It’s a really hard thing to come to terms with as someone who has never personally seen war.”

Lysenko said she plans to relocate once the fighting is over.

“I still want to go back,” she said. “That’s my goal. I really love it there. I have a deep attachment to it: It’s my heritage, my roots.”

On an even more practical level, the country is the subject of her dissertation, though it, too, is on hold as she copes with news of the occupation.

Hulievska, from Dartmouth, understands the delay. She was so worried about keeping up with her own studies that she asked her professors for extensions for incomplete assignments. With the encouragement of her dean, they’ve accommodated her requests.

“I just cannot do any kind of work right now except for organizing rallies and fundraisers,” she said.

Her efforts — and those of many other U.S-based students — have not gone unnoticed in the war zone.

Marina Shapar, 26, told The 74 she’s spent the last several days living inside her basement in Kyiv with nine other people, including her parents, siblings and neighbors. She communicates with friends and relatives via cell phone to keep track of Russian advancement and to determine when it’s safe to go out for food.

Shapar, who shared video clips of blood-soaked bodies lying dead in the street, is encouraged by the support she’s seeing from abroad. But she’s also worried about the virulent misinformation campaigns that mischaracterize ����������Ա�’s stance on the invasion and downplay its suffering.

She asks that young people help spread the truth.

“You know,” she said, “students are our future.”

Lead Image: Marta Hulievska, 19 and a freshman at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, pictured in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Hulievska is trying to balance news of the war — her family is in and out of bomb shelters daily — with her studies. (Anna Haiuk)