“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.” That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt. But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike? Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools—schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs—as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.

A comprehensive analysis of the astonishing changes that elevated the Chicago public school system from one of the worst in the nation to one of the most improved. How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools tells the story of the extraordinary thirty-year school reform effort that changed the landscape of public education in Chicago. Acclaimed educational researcher Anthony S. Bryk joins five coauthors directly involved in Chicago’s education reform efforts, Sharon Greenberg, Albert Bertani, Penny Sebring, Steven E. Tozer, and Timothy Knowles, to illuminate the many factors that led to this transformation of the Chicago Public Schools. Beginning in 1987, Bryk and colleagues lay out the civic context for reform, outlining the systemic challenges such as segregation, institutional racism, and income and resource disparities that reformers grappled with as well as the social conflicts they faced. Next, they describe how fundamental changes occurred at every level of schooling: enhancing classroom instruction; organizing more engaged and effective local school communities; strengthening the preparation, recruitment, and support of teachers and school leaders; and sustaining an ambitious evidence-based campaign to keep the public informed on the progress of key reform initiatives and the challenges still ahead. The power of this capacity building is validated by unprecedented increases in benchmarks such as graduation rates and college matriculation. This riveting account introduces key actors within the schools, city government, and business community, and the partnerships they forged. It also reveals the surprising yet essential role of Chicago's innovative information infrastructure in aligning disparate initiatives. In making clear how elements such as advocacy, civic capacity, improvement research, and strong democracy contributed to large-scale progress in the system's 600-plus schools, the book highlights the greater lessons that the Chicago story offers for system improvement overall.

Since the late 1990s, mass school closures have reshaped urban education across the United States. Popular media coverage and research reports link this resurgence of school closures in major cities like Chicago and Philadelphia to charter school expansion, municipal budget deficits, and racial segregation. However, this phenomenon is largely overlooked in contemporary education scholarship. Shuttered Schools: Race, Community, and School Closures in American Cities (Information Age Publishing) is an interdisciplinary volume that integrates multiple perspectives to study the complex practice of school closure—an issue that transcends education. Academics, practitioners, activists, and policymakers will recognize the far-reaching implications of these decisions for school communities. Shuttered Schools features rigorous new studies of school closures in cities across the United States. This research contextualizes contemporary school closures and accounts for their disproportionate impact on African American students. With topics ranging from gentrification and redevelopment to student experiences with school loss, research presented in this text incorporates various methods (e.g., case studies, interviews, regression techniques, and textual analysis) to evaluate the intended and unintended consequences of closure for students, families, and communities. This work demonstrates that shifts in the social, economic, and political contexts of education inform closure practice in meaningful ways. The impacts of shuttering schools are neither colorblind nor class-neutral, but indeed interact with social contexts in ways that reify existing social inequalities in education.

In the wake of the tragedy and destruction that came with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, public schools in New Orleans became part of an almost unthinkable experiment—eliminating the traditional public education system and completely replacing it with charter schools and school choice. Fifteen years later, the results have been remarkable, and the complex lessons learned should alter the way we think about American education. New Orleans became the first US city ever to adopt a school system based on the principles of markets and economics. When the state took over all of the city’s public schools, it turned them over to non-profit charter school managers accountable under performance-based contracts. Students were no longer obligated to attend a specific school based upon their address, allowing families to act like consumers and choose schools in any neighborhood. The teacher union contract, tenure, and certification rules were eliminated, giving schools autonomy and control to hire and fire as they pleased. In Charter School City, Douglas N. Harris provides an inside look at how and why these reform decisions were made and offers many surprising findings from one of the most extensive and rigorous evaluations of a district school reform ever conducted. Through close examination of the results, Harris finds that this unprecedented experiment was a noteworthy success on almost every measurable student outcome. But, as Harris shows, New Orleans was uniquely situated for these reforms to work well and that this market-based reform still required some specific and active roles for government. Letting free markets rule on their own without government involvement will not generate the kinds of changes their advocates suggest. Combining the evidence from New Orleans with that from other cities, Harris draws out the broader lessons of this unprecedented reform effort. At a time when charter school debates are more based on ideology than data, this book is a powerful, evidence-based, and in-depth look at how we can rethink the roles for governments, markets, and nonprofit organizations in education to ensure that America’s schools fulfill their potential for all students.

In 2013, the School District of Philadelphia closed ten percent of its traditional public schools. Citing poor academic performance, declining enrollments, and fiscal constraints, the District deployed school closure as an education reform strategy. Other districts mirror Philadelphia's efforts, closing from five to fifty percent of their public schools. This dissertation examines how public school closures, sales, and reuse can be seen not only as education reform policy, but also as urban policy, transforming the physical, social, and political fabric of a city. This dissertation thus extends the work on the education-related impacts of school closures, and demonstrates the salience of school closures from an urban policy and planning perspective. Using Philadelphia as a case study, I draw on theories of frame analysis and use ethnographic methods to explore the discourses of closure that circulate among policy makers, residents, and the broader public. I conducted seven months of fieldwork in Philadelphia, including 118 interviews with City and School District staff, residents, and non-profit leaders, and participated in City, School District, and neighborhood association meetings. I look not only at the closure decision-making process, but also follow the trajectory of school buildings from vacancy to the transformation of schools into capital assets to the reimagining of school reuse. Examining the discursive frames of school closures, sales, and reuse is a first step at grappling with the racialized tensions and material consequences of this policy intervention. Chapters 1 and 2 provide an introduction to the issue of and current empirical research on public school closures, and background on the City and School District of Philadelphia. Chapter 3 situates the Philadelphia case in a larger national context by examining newspaper media coverage in 13 cities across the country. Coverage fosters a conflictual and dichotomous framing of closures, reducing plural meanings of schools to two competing and singular arguments: arguments for closure, based in rationality and technical expertise and arguments opposing closure, based in emotionally laden messaging. Media are predominantly sympathetic to the problem definition and causal interpretations of school closure proponents. Newspaper media do not maximize their role as a democratic institution, and neglect the disproportionate and racialized impact of closures. In Chapter 4, I move to the Philadelphia case. I use Philadelphia's school closures as a revelatory case to shed light on the multifaceted values that schools have to neighborhoods, planning, and urban governance. Schools are valued economically, socio-spatially, and symbolically, and this extreme case expands the scope of these values currently found in the literature. Economically, schools are an employment center, often for neighborhood residents; assets or liabilities that contribute to school district fiscal solvency; and redevelopment sites and vehicles for private profit making. Socio-spatially, closures reveal how school buildings have potentially negative value, as attractive nuisances in the absence of stewardship. Schools are key physical landmarks in the urban fabric, serving as nodes on pathways throughout the neighborhood, shaped by individual perceptions of safety and community. Symbolically, closures stand in for larger processes of neighborhood change, triggering or exacerbating fears about gentrification or continued disinvestment. Decisions about schools represent a larger and historically racialized relationship between particular communities and the public sector, one that is defined by systemic respect or disrespect. In Chapter 5, I build on the values identified in Chapter 4 and describe the three discursive frames of school closures that emerged from my research: closure as crisis management, closure as loss, and closure as oppression. Each one places schools in a different spatial context - from the a-spatial market (crisis management) to the school site and/or neighborhood (loss) to broader citywide patterns of re/development (oppression). This variation is tied to different notions of time, which foreground the past, present, and future in divergent ways. Chapter 6 concludes with reflections on the racialized nature of school closures, sales, and reuse, and on directions for practice and research. My findings demonstrate that to understand the consequences of school closures, research needs to examine not only the moment of closure, but also the subsequent sales and reuse of school buildings. "Placing" schools in this way situates this education reform policy in its spatial context, and reveals how school infrastructure is urban infrastructure, playing a central role in urban change. This study also illustrates the importance historicizing school closures, and considering links to past and present place-based policies that have sought to improve poor neighborhoods, yet have had racist impacts. This study documents how the administrative boundaries of the school district and school attendance catchment areas define people's mental maps of their neighborhoods, and challenges planners to consider school district or school attendance boundaries as a spatial unit of analysis. The tensions over perceived lines of accountability, political action, and resistance around school closures, sales, and reuse also suggest more reflection and attention by practitioners to bridge cross-sector silos and reconsider silo-ed public engagement processes. This research reveals the ways that schools are sites of contestation in the politics of place. It helps further understanding of the geographic and geopolitical boundaries that are tied to school sites and school districts. It enhances planners' conceptualization of and work at the nexus of place and schools. From an urban policy or planning perspective public school closures, sales, and reuse call for a recalibration or assessment of interventions in neighborhoods, cities, and regions.