Abstract:  State takeovers of local school districts do not, on average, improve academic performance. Yet, in 2023, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) proceeded to take over the Houston Independent School District (HISD) with the stated purpose of improving academic outcomes. Given this incongruence, this paper explores how the discourse employed by those enacting the takeover in HISD reveals what is produced in the process of takeover. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), I examine the state-appointed superintendent’s discursive use of ‘the future’ to justify, construct, and enact takeover intervention by the state. In his discourse, I find the future is represented as fixed and radically different from the present, requiring takeover actors to authoritatively prescribe processes of schooling so that students, especially Black and Latinx students, will be prepared for this future. The two presentations I analyze, one at the very beginning of the takeover and the other a year later, demonstrate how the HISD takeover is a form of racial authoritarian preemption. This contributes to the literature which argues that takeover produces mechanisms of control over Black and Latinx communities, not improved educational institutions. These findings help clarify the harm of takeover, suggesting that coloniality and supremacist ideology are maintained through takeover, and teaching and learning practices are greatly limited. Given these findings, I suggest educators, students, and communities can collectively bring alternative (decolonial) futures into schooling to expand the potential for teaching and learning where it has been flattened through takeover.