Breaking up Is Hard to Do: The Dissolution of Judicial Supervision of Public Services

• Author: Charles R. Wise,Rosemary O'Leary
• Published date: 01 March 2003
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6210.00278
• Date: 01 March 2003

The Dissolution of Judicial Supervision of Public Services 177

Charles R. Wise

Indiana University

Rosemary O’Leary

Syracuse University

Breaking up Is Hard to Do: The Dissolution of

Judicial Supervision of Public Services

Public services in many states have been placed under federal court supervision. In our 1991

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article, we examined the implications of the federal judicial decisions in supervising the Kansas

City Metropolitan School District for the “new triumviate” governing public services—public offi-

cials, legislators, and judges. In this article, we examine judicial decisions affecting the same

school district a decade later to reveal the impact of judicial supervision on the school district and

to discern the implications for policy termination. We find that, once begun, judicially mandated

federal court supervision of public institutions is not readily terminated, even pursuant to the wishes

of the United States Supreme Court.

In our 1991 Public Administration Review article, we

examined the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s

Missouri v. Jenkins (494 U.S. 33 [1990]) decision for

American public administration. In that case, the Court

affirmed a federal district court order that imposed local

property tax increases for Kansas City, Missouri, residents

as a means of raising funds for the local school district’s

desegregation efforts. Our 1991 article concluded that the

decision had empowered and legitimized actions by school

administrators, in addition to enhancing the resources avail-

able to the school system. The decision, however, severely

limited local administrators’ ability to set priorities and to

control the implementation of many administrative initia-

tives, from contracting the construction of new facilities to

hiring new personnel. New management challenges, par-

ticularly in the areas of interoganizational relations and

accountability, posed constant demands. The article also

concluded that by sanctioning court-ordered taxation, Mis-

souri v. Jenkins may also have expanded the new partner-

ship between the courts and public managers—a bipolar

relationship—into a “new triumvirate” that includes legis-

lative bodies, but with the courts retaining the senior part-

nership position.

More than a decade later, this analysis of the Kansas

City situation and the Missouri v. Jenkins case is presented

with two purposes in mind: first, to study how the impact

of the decision has changed in the intervening years, with

a particular emphasis on policy termination as the district

court has attempted unsuccessfully to remove itself from

the case; and second, to glean any new lessons for public

administration by taking a longitudinal look. Based on in-

terviews with school district personnel, a former school

board member, a former member of the court-appointed

desegregation monitoring committee, and residents—

supplemented by legal and archival research—we conclude

that, once begun, a policy of judicially mandated federal

court supervision of public institutions is not readily ter-

minated, even pursuant to the expressed wish of the U.S.

Supreme Court. We also conclude that the management

implications of long-term judicial control of public insti-

tutions are more significant than previous authors have

realized.

Charles R. Wise is a professor of public affairs at Indiana University and the

former managing editor of

Public Administration Review

and he has received

the William E. Mosher and Frederick C. Mosher Award for best academic

article in

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three times.

Email: wise@indiana.edu

.

Rosemary O’Leary is a professor of public administration and a senior scholar

at the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at the Maxwell School of Syracuse

University. Her coauthored book,

Managing for the Environment

(Jossey-

Bass, 1999), won the 2000 award for Best Book in Public and Nonprofit

Management given by the Academy of Management and the 1999 Best

Book Award given by ASPA’s Section on Environmental and Natural Re-

sources Administration. Email: roleary@maxwell.syr.edu. Their previous

article, “Public Managers, Judges, and Legislators, Redefining the New Part-

nership,” received the Mosher Award for best academic article in

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.