In the past year, over 1,000 public schools were closed across the nation. This session will focus on public school closures as a strategy of education reform in large urban districts. Speakers will draw on their own past and ongoing empirical research on school closures in Philadelphia, PA, Newark, NJ, and Chicago, IL and on the emergent scholarship studying cases across the country and in Canada. This research deploys a diversity of methodological approaches, including geo-spatial analysis, quantitative analysis, in-depth interviews, ethnography, and participatory-action research. The range of approaches enables a richer understanding of the many ways school closures affect communities and cities. Speakers will initiate and facilitate discussion on tensions in closure decision-making processes, the ways these processes shape concepts of citizenship, and impacts on surrounding neighborhoods and city-wide patterns of inequality.
