More Than Closed Doors: Shuttered Schools Reproduce Spatial and Racial Inequities

• In Event: Education Reform and the Reproduction of Inequalities

Abstract

The discourse on educational responsibilities and reconciliatory policies is less attentive to the physiological and spatial experiences associated with our unequal system. Drawing on visual and secondary data resources and interviews, this paper examines the spatiality of systemic inequalities in education. Specifically, I examine the spatial trajectories associated with the progressing school closings in Gary, Indiana. In doing so, I highlight how even when the schools are sold or repurposed, spatial inequities are not dissolved, instead, the closings illuminate the obduracy of state-sponsored discrimination that plays out in spaces predominately occupied by minorities. Thus, educational responsibilities should include attention to the closed schools during, immediate after, and years beyond the process.

Author

• gwendolyn Purifoye, North Park University