Shifting Landscapes of Power and Privilege: Public School Closures and Uneven Development in Philadelphia.

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

In 2013, the School District of Philadelphia closed 24 of its 242 traditional public schools, displacing thousands of students, changing the physical and social fabric of neighborhoods, and transforming access to opportunity for families across the city.

My dissertation uses this case of mass public school closures and the sales and reuse of school buildings in Philadelphia to shed light on the complex dynamics of school and neighborhood change. I do this by asking three research questions that taken together allow me to unpack the interrelationships between discourse, action, and material impact of school closures and disposition in neighborhoods: (1) What are the competing frames of school closure, sales, and reuse? (2) How do these frames motivate policy decisions and political action? (3) How do closures, sales, and reuse complement or conflict with other planning and community development in neighborhoods?

I conducted 14 months of data collection and analysis, including seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Philadelphia. I conducted 112 informal and formal interviews with respondents (neighborhood adult and youth residents; developers; and staff from the school district, city government, citywide and neighborhood non-profits, and policy think tanks) conducted in Fall 2014 and Summer 2015. Analytically, I use frame analysis (Goffman 1974; Schon and Rein 1995; Yanow 2000). Frames are the building blocks of understanding that set focus and direction for action. Utilizing frame analysis allows me to uncover the complexity – and often incoherence – between multiple and sometimes competing frames. I follow scholars that marry frame analysis with ethnographic methods to understand how frames are both deployed by officials and become embodied in the lived experience of residents (Gowan 2010). By triangulating multiple data sources, frame analysis reveals biases, theoretical assumptions, and contradictory ideals and values about neighborhood investment and public education.

I identify three frames of school closures that imply different values of schools for
neighborhoods and also point to different spatial and temporal references:

• Closures as crisis management argues that school closures and disposition of closed school buildings are the result of dramatic demographic changes; necessary, if not draconian, district fiscal management;, and a powerful “market.” From this perspective, these forces are inevitable, and decision makers are doing the best they can to deal with things out of their control. This frame is predominantly a-spatial and ahistorical.

• Closures as loss focuses on the socio-spatial role schools play in neighborhoods, as
centers of community, and the ways that closures create gaps in a neighborhood landscape for not only education, but also recreation, social gathering, and service delivery. This frame links familial and community history to the present closures primarily at the scale of the neighborhood.

• Closures as oppression situates school closures, sales, and reuse in a broader historical context of policy decisions that repeatedly have disadvantaged low- income communities and communities of color for generations – from slavery to the Jim Crow south and the redlined north to Urban Renewal to the foreclosure crisis and on and on. From this perspective, school closures are another manifestation of systemic oppression: school building disposition is dispossession. This frame expresses a spatial expansiveness and a temporal fluidity, moving back and forth across scales (school, neighborhood, city, nation) and time.

These frames make different claims about the meanings and impacts of closure, shaping
not only the policy-making context but also setting the stage for particular kinds of political action in opposition to closures and disposition of the school buildings.

I draw on planning theory of time and place (Fullilove 2001; Lynch 1972; Massey 1995), sociological theory on social suffering (Dumas 2014), and critical geography and race theories (Finney 2014; Harvey 1990, 2001; McKittrick and Woods 2007) to make sense of the different ways each frame situates school closures in space and time. This analysis complicates current research on schools and community development that position schools only as “centers of community” or “anchor institutions” in neighborhoods, and illustrates the ways that the provision of public education is tied to other scales of urban development. Uncovering divergent frames of school closures and their spatial and temporal foci help explain the tensions in the Philadelphia closure and reuse processes, and may point to a path forward for better policy and practice there and in other cities.

Studies of public school closures have failed to see how school closures are embedded in broader patterns of urban change; urban studies and planning scholarship has failed to consider public schools as a central “actor” in urban change. My work brings these approaches together, situating the question of school closures within the larger context of neighborhood change and considering schools as redevelopment sites. Inspired by educational researchers who emphasize the need to understand the broader contextual factors (e.g., poverty and segregation) that influence educational systems (Anyon 1997; Lipman 2011; Noguera 2003) and drawing on interdisciplinary work on the “geography of opportunity” (Briggs 2005; Squires and Kubrin 2005), I argue that school closures not only serve as an education reform strategy, but also as an urban policy that shapes patterns of development and opportunity across cities.

Author

• Ariel H Bierbaum, University of California - Berkeley