School Closings in Chicago: Learning From and With Parents and Community Members

• In Event: 26.021 - Community Resistance to School Closings: Defending Public Education in Chile and Chicago

Abstract

Citing budget deficits, inefficient use of under-enrolled school facilities, aging school buildings, and/or low academic performance (Dowdall, 2011), urban U.S. school districts are closing large numbers of schools. Since 2001, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has closed, phased out, consolidated or turned over to private operators over 150 neighborhood public schools in low-income African American and Latino/a communities (Vevea, Lutton & Karp, 2013). As a result, some African American communities have almost no public open-enrollment neighborhood schools (Karp, 2013). Controversy and protest surround this neoliberal strategy in Chicago and other cities. When CPS closed 50 schools in 2013, tens of thousands of parents, students, teachers, and community members attended pubic hearings, protested, and beseeched the Mayor and his appointed School Board to invest in and improve their schools, not close them. Despite increasing school closings, the controversy surrounding them, and disproportionate racial impact, there is very little research on this strategy. A few studies show that only students who transfer to highest performing schools benefit academically (de la Torre & Gwynne, 2009; Engberg, 2012), and districts save little money by closings schools (Dowdall, 2011). But there is little research on overall implications for students, families, and communities.
This paper has three objectives: 1) examine the human side of school closings in Chicago—effects on children’ social emotional wellbeing, safety, and academic experience; parents’ involvement in their schools; and meaning of closing a school for families and communities; 2) examine Chicago school closings in relation to poverty, race, and housing security/insecurity and other destabilizing community factors produced by neoliberal urban policy; 3) catalogue resistance and, eschewing “damage research,” imagine “how findings [of this study] might be used by, for, and with communities” (Tuck, 2009, p. 409).
The paper draws on ten years of ethnographic research on resistance to school closings; analysis of policy documents, reports, and other publicly available demographic and educational data; spatial mapping of community factors and school actions using GIS; narratives of parents of students whose schools were closed in 2013; and collaborative research/action with parents and community members, privileging voices of those directly affected (Paris & Winn, 2014).
Theoretical concepts taken from critical geography, urban studies, political economy, and critical theories of race (Brenner & Theodore, 20002; Harvey, 2005; Lipman, 2011; Lipsitz, 2011) frame analysis of the interrelation of school closings and dislocation produced by neoliberal urban policy. The author also builds on the work of Fullilove (2005) and Lipsitz (2011) to define the meaning of schools as place-making institutions in Black communities.
The author argues that school closings have a negative social-emotional impact on children and families who report sustained trauma from displacement and dislocation. Moreover, neighborhood schools are intergenerational stabilizing institutions in urban communities faced with destabilizing housing and economic conditions and public disinvestment. Despite their failings, schools in Black communities often embody community heritage and culture binding a neighborhood together. When these schools are closed, the community is undermined as a space of collective support, political agency, and solidarity (Fullilove, 2005; Lipman, 2011; Lipsitz, 2011).

Author

• Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois at Chicago