As Alana Semuels wrote for The Atlantic in 2016, the fight over segregation in Little Rock’s public-school system looks different now than it did in 1957. It’s not a question of whether students of different races can go to school with one another, but whether they ever will. “What’s stunning about today’s methods of avoiding integration is that they are, by and large, legal, but they nevertheless leave black students stuck in schools that are separate and unequal,” Semuels wrote. The students south of I-630 are still left with less.

Then, in 2014, Little Rock elected a majority-black school board for the first time. It made sense; at the time, two out of every three students in the Little Rock School District were black, according to a University of Arkansas database. And the two newly elected school-board members had focused their campaigns on addressing the district’s inequality. But before they had a chance to do so, the local board’s power was taken away. A few months after the election, on January 28, 2015, the Arkansas State Board of Education voted to take control of the Little Rock School District.

“They believed that the state could offer some more stability and bring some more healing to the Little Rock School District,” Anika Whitfield, one of the co-chairs of the education advocacy organization Grassroots Arkansas, told me. With the takeover, the argument for local control of public schools had been turned on its head. Typically, conservatives argue that more local control is better—but here, a conservative-led state board was advocating for top-down intervention.

But stability did not follow. “Within the first year of the takeover, we had four superintendents,” Whitfield said. When the state took over the district, six schools were failing its assessment; the state’s 2019 data show that eight now are. After nearly five years, the state had not accomplished the fundamental goals of the takeover. Some residents of Little Rock were frustrated, but there was little they could do. When a locally elected school board is failing, members of the community can vote them out, Ali Noland, a parent in the district, told me. But when the school board consists of state-appointed officials, the same oversight is not possible. The relative feeling of powerlessness unified the community, Noland and other parents, elected officials, and advocates I spoke with told me. Black, brown, and white parents—wealthy and low-income families—all coalesced around the idea that they should have local control of their public schools.

Then at a special board meeting in September of this year, as the five-year deadline to relinquish control of the schools from the state’s hands was approaching, the state board released its plan to return some control to the district. The plan created a tiered system. Schools that were rated as failing would operate under “different leadership” from the rest of the schools in the district, though it was unclear what exactly that meant. Only the top-rated schools in the district would be led by an elected school board. Each of the ‘F’-rated schools, save for one, was south of I-630.