HOUSTON — Harold V. Dutton Jr. was proud to have walked the same high school halls that Barbara Jordan, the first black woman elected to Congress from the South, did. Ms. Jordan graduated in 1951 from Houston’s Phillis Wheatley High School, a pillar for nearly a century in the Fifth Ward, one of Houston’s historic black neighborhoods.

Mr. Dutton, 74, graduated from Wheatley 10 years after Ms. Jordan and went on to become a lawyer and Democratic lawmaker in the state House of Representatives. He watched his old high school deteriorate as poverty spread through the Fifth Ward and grew increasingly frustrated by what he felt was a lack of urgency by local educators.

His solution has embroiled the city’s entire public school system in a bitter fight that has stirred legal, political and racial turmoil in the largest school district in Texas. This month, the state’s education commissioner informed the leaders of the Houston Independent School District that the state was taking it over, citing the repeated failing performance of Wheatley as one of the reasons.

Mr. Dutton opened the door to the takeover as the co-author of a law that created what education experts have called one of the harshest remedies in the country for troubled schools. Under its terms, any district that has even one school that consistently fails to meet state standards for five or more years must either shut the campus or face the possibility of a state takeover.