Closed for Business

In January 2010, the architects of Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s Academic Transformation Plan dropped the bomb on the students and staff of East High School. The school, along with 17 others, was slated for closure as part of the sweeping reform initiative. The rationales: poor academic performance, declining enrollment and the district’s $53 million budget shortfall.

Raymond Cooke—the last senior class president the 110-year-old school would ever have—took the news hard. “It was a very emotional time for us; heartbreaking and depressing,” he says. “It was like being put out of your home.”

Cooke, his classmates and other community members attended district meetings about the proposed closure, but he got the impression that the meetings were little more than public displays of sympathy put on by officials. “We didn’t have a voice,” he says. “The blame [for closing East High] was put on us.”

The fate of Cooke’s alma mater is playing out again and again in low-income neighborhoods across the country. Closing “underperforming” public schools—rather than restructuring or funneling resources toward them—is one piece of the puzzle. In a growing number of communities, promoting publicly funded but privately managed charter schools to replace them is another piece. But researchers are now questioning this one-two approach to urban school reform. A grassroots movement of students, families, educators and community members is organizing locally and nationally to defend their rights as decision makers for schools that have long provided identity and stability for their neighborhoods.

More Than a School

Cooke remembers his school as more than a daytime place of learning. It was a community hub, polling place and a site for health and art fairs. It had a newly renovated gym, a culinary arts facility and a beautiful atrium.

“I was one of those strange kids who wanted to come back someday and walk into my old classrooms,” Cooke says. “I wanted to be a role model for the students who came after me.” Part of his deep disappointment with the closure of East High was losing the chance to give back to a place that had been a community cornerstone.

“When a neighborhood loses its schools, it also loses an institution that builds relationships among local residents and binds generations, while it serves local children,” writes Elaine Simon in The Notebook, a watchdog newspaper serving Philadelphia Public Schools. Simon, co-director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, has researched Philadelphia’s school-reform efforts for three decades. “Losing schools makes it all the more likely that these neighborhoods will deteriorate further.”

Closure in Context

School closures are part of the reform agenda in dozens of major U.S. cities. The vast majority of closures have taken place in black and brown neighborhoods, communities with limited economic and political clout and high rates of poverty. Most targeted schools are struggling with overwhelming needs that extend far beyond the classroom.

Advocates of school closures point to test scores and academic achievement gaps as evidence of failure. Policymakers often blame school employees—specifically the teachers—for low test scores. This posture is at least as cynical as it is “decontextualized,” says social psychologist Anne Galletta, a professor at Cleveland State University and member of a research collective looking at the consequences of school closures in the city. One example of the missing context is that teachers in these under-resourced schools are often coping with high percentages of English language learners and students with special needs. As education activist Jitu Brown, national director of Journey for Justice Alliance, stated in a speech he made during the battle to save Dyett High School in Chicago: “We’re tired of our children and our communities being demonized and being blamed for being underserved.”

Galletta agrees. “We’ve got to go beyond high-stakes standardized test scores as the sole measure of improvement,” she says. “We’ve got to look at the lives of youth, their families and the neighborhoods in which they live.”

False Promises

Troubling to Galletta, Brown and other critics of school closures is the willingness of policymakers to ignore local voices in favor of promising reform narratives that often prove false.

One of the reasons most frequently given for closing schools is that closures save money, but evidence to the contrary is mounting. In 2013, officials in Chicago Public Schools admitted to overstating their savings from school closures by at least $122 million. In Washington, D.C., school closings cost the district $40 million—four times as much as had been estimated. In many cities, securing and maintaining unsold school properties are adding to budgetary woes.

Another justification for school closures is the need to improve student performance, but this outcome isn’t guaranteed either. There is no clear evidence to indicate that schools receiving students displaced by closures have better academic track records than the schools that close. A study, conducted by Matthew F. Larsen at the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, indicates that most students from closed schools experience “negative shock,” resulting in lower attendance, lower GPAs, and lower chances of graduating.

Transferring to a charter school doesn’t cause a magic turnabout in academic performance either. The Evaluation of Charter School Impacts, a large-scale study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education and conducted by Mathematica, compared students who were accepted into charter middle schools with an equivalent sample of students who applied to the same schools but were not selected and, instead, enrolled in their district middle schools. The study found little or no significant academic benefit related to charter school attendance.

Defending and Helping

The aggressiveness of urban school reform plans has caught many communities and school districts off guard in the past, but a growing number of families, students, educators and community leaders are taking up the cause of school closure and organizing for alternative outcomes.

Nationally, advocacy groups are shining more light on how sweeping reforms such as school closures are specifically targeting under-resourced communities and contributing to the resegregation of U.S. schools in the process. The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, the Journey for Justice Alliance and the National Opportunity to Learn Campaign are three organizations advocating for greater equity in education and offering information and support to local activists.