States have unilaterally seized control of public schools and districts since 1989. While early state takeovers focused on assisting public schools and districts in financial distress, more recent takeovers have targeted public schools and districts deemed to be in academic distress. Current scholarship considers the consequences of state takeover legislation on student outcomes and political representation, but there is a paucity of research on news coverage of states’ implementation of state takeovers of public schools and districts. We address this gap in the literature by conducting a Critical Discourse Analysis of local news coverage of Texas’ state takeover of the Houston Independent School District, comparing the coverage of the state’s implementation of state takeover legislation in minority-owned/operated newspapers and white-owned newspapers. Leveraging critical race perspectives, we found that minority-owned newspapers presented more and deeper coverage of the racialized impacts of the state’s implementation of state takeover legislation as compared to the white-owned newspapers. We suggest that the dominance of the white-owned newspaper and its coverage of the state takeover of the Houston Independent School District contributed to the maintenance of racially oppressive implementations of education-related law(s).