The press has been filled with stories of school districts across the U.S. figuring out how to cut costs.  Many districts face enrollment declines as families have fewer children, a situation complicated by enrollment declines that have remained post-COVID and urban enrollment declines due to suburban out-migration. All this is happening as federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds are running out and must be fully committed to projects by September, 2024. Some school districts are looking at cutting teachers and programs initiated with ESSER funds; others are contemplating consolidation plans that involve closing schools.

For Education Week, Evie Blad reports: “Through an informal survey of news reports, the Advancement Project has tracked at least 65 districts with schools set to close before the 2024-2025 school year. And the organization expects those talks to accelerate in the next few years; at least 21 districts have launched facilities audits and boundary studies, which often precede closures.”

But school closures often have serious negative consequences, as we ought to have learned by watching  a two-decades long, real life experiment with school closure as a tool for school reform.  In 2002, No Child Left Behind introduced school closure as a “school turnaround plan.” (You’ll remember: Shut down the so-called “failing” school and move the students elsewhere.) Later school closures were featured as one of the turnaround options to be implemented when states won federal School Improvement Grants. We have all watched what happened in New Orleans and Chicago and Oakland.  The results have not been promising.

In 2016, Christopher Lubienski and a colleague at the University of Illinois issued a warning: “For urban school districts that plan to close schools in an attempt to save money, schools located in poor areas are often the first targets to be eliminated or consolidated.  Consequently, this process leads to the loss of community schools for children who already reside in less advantaged neighborhoods. Current school closures, which tend to neglect underlying spatial contexts in urban cores, expose children in racially segregated and highly insecure communities to a double trap by lowering their ease of access to schools.”

Certainly that was true when Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed nearly 50 neighborhood schools in Chicago at the end of the 2012-2013 school year after the district’s Renaissance 2010 project opened masses of charter schools to compete in the education marketplace.  University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing reported: “Of the students who would be affected by the closures, 88 percent were black: 90 percent of the schools were majority black, and 71 percent had mostly black teachers….” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 5)

In 2018, the Chicago Consortium on School Research examined further evidence that the 2013 school closures had disrupted students’ education in myriad ways:  “When the closures took place at the end of the 2012-13 school year, nearly 12,000 students were attending the 47 elementary schools that closed that year, close to 17,000 students were attending the 48 designated welcoming schools, and around 1,100 staff were employed in the closed schools.”  “Our findings show that the reality of school closures was much more complex than policymakers anticipated…. Interviews with affected students and staff revealed major challenges with logistics, relationships and school culture… Closed school staff and students came into welcoming schools grieving and, in some cases, resentful that their schools closed while other schools stayed open. Welcoming school staff said they were not adequately supported to serve the new population and to address resulting divisions. Furthermore, leaders did not know what it took to be a successful welcoming school… Staff and students said that it took a long period of time to build new school cultures and feel like a cohesive community.”

While some of the problems arose because of the complexity of managing the transition, there were deeper problems. The Chicago Consortium on School Research continues: “When schools closed, it severed the longstanding social connections that families and staff had with their schools and with one another, resulting in a period of mourning… The intensity of the feelings of loss were amplified in cases where schools had been open for decades, with generations of families attending the same neighborhood school. Losing their closed schools was not easy and the majority of interviewees spoke about the difficulty they had integrating and socializing into the welcoming schools.” “Even though welcoming school staff and students did not lose their schools per se, many also expressed feelings of loss because incorporating a large number of new students required adjustments.”

In Ghosts in the Schoolyard, her powerful book on Chicago’s school closures, sociologist Eve Ewing discusses the impact of school closures on not only the students and teachers, but also on the broader community: “Institutional mourning is the social and emotional experience undergone by individuals and communities facing the loss of a shared institution they are affiliated with—such as a school, church, residence, neighborhood, or business district—especially when those individuals or communities occupy a socially marginalized status that amplifies their reliance on the institution for its significance in their lives… In institutional mourning this doesn’t just mean love for a school or for the people in it. It can also mean love for ourselves within the school. In losing a school one loses a version of oneself—a self understood to be a member of a community, living and learning in relation to other community members. Without the school to act as a hub, that membership is gone. (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, pp. 127-131)

Ewing concludes: “It’s worth stating explicitly: my purpose in this book is not to say that school closure should never happen. Rather, in expanding the frame within which we see school closure as a policy decision, we find ourselves with a new series of questions….  What is the history that has brought us to this moment?  How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it?  Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard) pp. 155-159)

Last week Education Week published some encouraging news. Evie Blad reports that civil rights leaders have been paying attention to the research on the damage caused by school closures. Two organizations have demanded that the U.S. Department of Education release formal guidance to ensure that Black, and Brown communities are no longer routinely victimized: “As a growing number of districts consider closing schools to cut costs, civil rights groups want guardrails to ensure students of color don’t bear the brunt of those decisions. They’ve asked the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights to draw a line in the sand by issuing guidance about when school closures run afoul of federal civil rights laws by placing an unfair burden on students from a racial or ethnic minority group or students with disabilities. ‘The research on school closures and lived experiences of the students and families whose neighborhood schools were closed overwhelmingly shows that school closures are harmful to students and their families….’ said a May 30 letter to the federal agency from two civil rights organizations, the Advancement Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

Blad continues, describing the two organizations’ demand that school closures no longer impose disparate impact on Black and Brown families: “Even when districts target schools for closure with criteria that appear to be racially neutral, their decisions could violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination in schools, or disability rights laws, said the letter… A district may cause disparate impact if closes an elementary school with a disproportionately high enrollment of Black students, forcing displaced children to travel longer distances than their peers to get to school, the groups argued. And selecting schools based on factors like the age of buildings may layer new harms on top of historical patterns of funding inequities and residential segregation, said Katherine Dunn, director of the Opportunity to Learn program at the Advancement Project.”

Blad adds: “Civil rights guidance is a non-binding federal document that cites court precedents to support the Education Department’s interpretation of federal laws, putting districts on notice about factors that could trigger an investigation or legal complaint.”

It’s about time for formal pushback against school closures that for too long have left the poorest, most segregated neighborhoods of big cities without the kind of well-supported neighborhood public schools that the rest of us take for granted. For years, school reformers promoting No Child Left Behind’s mantra of holding schools accountable alleged mistakenly, as we have now learned, that school closure would improve educational opportunity for our nation’s most vulnerable children. Now school closures are more likely to result from budgetary pressure on school districts. Whatever the justification used, it is an important development that the Advancement Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center are calling attention to the civil rights violations that need to be considered when school districts contemplate shuttering some of their buildings.