School Survival: Reimagining the Analysis of Socio-Cultural Institutions that persist amid waves of closures

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 13: Urban Services

Abstract

Over the last couple of years, more than six large urban districts announced plans to close schools, disproportionately affecting Black communities. Largely, academic scholarship focuses solely on school closures, including the aftermath of the communities affected. While I argue that work on school closures is timely and important, a narrow focus on school closures leaves much to be understood about the entire institutional reform space. In addition to the attention of school closures, I encourage attention to schools that survive, in hopes of understanding how particular schools are capable of evading the fate of their counterparts, even when they fall under similar strenuous events. In an effort to fill this research gap, this study utilizes an institutional perspective on both physical and cultural school and community. Drawing on Scott’s pillar of normative institution (2013), and Dawson (1994) and Morris’s (2009) theories of linked fate and communally bonded schools, I employ mixed-methods approach to (1) conduct a survival analysis to identify school-level and community-level features that increase and decrease the rate of, and overall likelihood of school survival/closure (2) study four century old Black high schools, in districts regularly challenged with closures, to learn what organizational adaptation and community organizing of school actors has contributed to their longevity. Early findings suggest that the makeup of the community, including housing tenure, number of elders, and specialized school programming, encourages a collective commitment or culturally moral obligation to uphold the school. A symbiotic relationship of the school to neighborhood-community becomes evident, as the school house becomes a physical, anchoring body of a larger social project. Even in this form, the schoolhouse also becomes deeply embedded, tantamount with the physical community as well, with each influencing the other.

Author

• Ja'Nya Banks, University of California-Berkeley