Community Cultural Wealth in Stakeholder Perceptions of the Return to Local Control of Schools

In the 1980s and 1990s, state governments began to take over local school districts in cities across the United States. After decades of local resistance to state control, communities are beginning to make strides in their efforts to regain local control. This paper examines local- and state-level stakeholders’ perceptions of the return to local control in Newark, New Jersey in 2018. Using an integrated critical race theory framework, we find conflicting reasons for returning local control, which we call practical and liberatory reasons and that the cultural wealth of local stakeholders propels the liberatory reasons for local control.