Depopulation, Institutional Survivorship, and Racial Inequality in Rural School Closure

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 19. Local, State, and Regional Landscapes and Educational Experiences

Abstract

School closures have become a defining feature of educational restructuring in rural America, yet little is known about how closure risks have been distributed across schools with different racial compositions over time. Using national administrative data on public schools operating in 1990 and tracking closures through 2023, this study examines whether racial integration shaped the survival of rural schools during a period of population decline and policy retrenchment. Drawing on survival and discrete-time hazard models, I show that racially integrated schools were generally more likely to persist than segregated schools nationwide. However, this pattern reverses in the rural South, where integrated schools faced significantly higher conditional risks of closure, even after accounting for enrollment levels, enrollment decline, and county socioeconomic conditions. These regional differences are not explained by demographic necessity alone. Instead, the findings suggest that institutional survival itself was stratified, rendering racially integrated schools especially vulnerable in contexts where public support for shared institutions was historically contested. By shifting attention from student sorting to institutional disappearance, this study highlights school closure as a mechanism through which racial inequality in rural education can be reproduced even in the absence of explicit segregation policy.

Author

• Ryan James Parsons, University of Mississippi