Abstract
This article presents an analysis of how people make sense of Philadelphia’s school closings in light of neighborhood change. I argue that as school districts make facilities decisions, they act as planners, legitimizing closure decisions and their racially disparate impacts by reifying quantitative metrics at the expense of meanings that residents use to understand schools. Considering schools as redevelopment sites in a larger urban context reveals how school districts are deeply engaged in the making and unmaking of places. Recasting the work of school districts as planning challenges planning researchers and practitioners to explore how to coordinate traditional planning efforts with school efforts.
Introduction
In 2013, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) closed 24—nearly 10 percent—of its traditional public schools.
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Like other urban districts across the country, SDP cited poor academic performance, declining enrollments, and fiscal constraints to argue that school closures were a much-needed education reform strategy. When SDP announced school closures, opposition from parents, advocacy organizations, and neighbors mounted. At a public hearing, one parent testified: I want you all to go and look up the word gentrification. This is not about test scores. This is not about your schools closing. This is about buildings being sold to developers for condominiums. . . . This is about pushing you out of your neighborhoods.
This mother’s testimony offers a direct counterargument to SDP’s claims of improved fiscal health and academics. Rather, she argues, the school district is an agent of urban development, building on Philadelphia’s long history of the displacement of low-income communities of color.
Schools are important institutions in cities, but could or would a school district—whose primary mission is the education of students—act in the domain of urban planning? I argue that as school districts make decisions about school facilities (i.e., closures, sales, and reuse), they assert the role of a planner, managing space and spatial order (Boyer 1986). In Philadelphia, in order to legitimize its decisions and their racially disparate impacts, SDP reified quantitative metrics and rationality at the expense of more ephemeral measures and meanings that residents use to understand schools.
Based on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork and more than 100 interviews, I analyze the ways people make sense of school closings and building disposition, and how their stories of these processes tie to the material stakes and political tensions of school and urban change. I draw on theories of interpretative policy analysis (Goffman 1974; Schon and Rein 1995; Yanow 2000; Gowan 2010; Weber 2002) and Beauregard’s (2015) treatment of “new materialism” to provide guidance on how distinct discursive constructions of policy issues affect the material conditions, meaning-making, and lived experiences of the city. I find three narratives of school closures and building disposition and tie these stories to the material stakes of urban change. The first, which dominated decision making, uses quantification and defines schools as commodities, financial liabilities or revenue, and real estate assets. Two counternarratives emphasize the relational meaning—rather than monetary value—of schools and highlight how schools are educational, social, and political infrastructure in neighborhoods.
Mass school closures and building disposition are an extreme case that shows how districts have the power to transform social and physical landscapes. Considering schools as redevelopment sites in a larger urban context foregrounds the complex and blurred boundaries between urban and education policy making. The analysis reveals how school districts are deeply engaged in the racialized and politicized making and unmaking of places. Recasting the work of school districts in the arena of spatial management creates a new imperative for planning researchers and practitioners, challenging us to take seriously education decision making, consider its repercussions, and explore ways to meaningfully coordinate traditional planning with school efforts.
Extending Current Understandings of School Closures
School districts always have opened and closed schools to manage fluctuations in demographics and student enrollment, reductions in state and federal funding, and evolving educational approaches. In these ways, closures today are similar, but they are also a vehicle and a consequence of today’s market-based logics embedded in education policy and promoted at all levels of government. 2 Schools are either “winners” or “losers,” as measured predominantly by standardized test scores. Losers face decreased funding, mandated staffing changes, and/or closure. This market model positions parents as consumers in an educational marketplace and prioritizes parental school choice. When parents choose to leave public schools, they directly contribute to declining enrollment, underutilization of public school buildings, and decreased funding, which exacerbate district fiscal challenges. 3
Market-based logics yield an overreliance on quantifiable metrics and a shift in the potential impacts districts consider when closing schools. In past decades, districts considered negative impacts on desegregation efforts, students, district resources, and neighborhoods (Andrews 1974; Dean 1981). Districts today focus on a more narrow set of concerns, looking to “right-size” by aligning projected enrollment with building capacity and budget (Deeds and Pattillo 2014; Dowdall 2011; Irwin and Seasons 2012).
When facing scarcity, governments prioritize quantifiable metrics in an attempt to bring technical expertise to highly interpretative, racialized, and intrinsically tension-fraught decision-making processes (Deeds and Pattillo 2014; Good 2016a; Valencia 1984; Buras 2013; Kirshner and Pozzoboni 2011; Khalifa et al. 2014; Hinkley 2017). This “quantification” is largely ahistorical and ignores the racialized histories of prior educational and urban policy making that have set the stage for current school closures (Lipman 2011; Lipman and Person 2007; Caven 2015). It also limits student and parent participation in decision making (Kirshner and Pozzoboni 2011; Pappas 2012; Finnigan and Lavner 2012; Basu 2004, 2007; Witten et al. 2003).
Despite the increasing prevalence of closures as an education policy tool, empirical studies on its efficacy for districts and students are decidedly mixed. Districts overstate projected costs savings of closures by minimizing or not anticipating the costs of personnel (which generally do not change), student transportation to more distant schools, and security and maintenance of shuttered schools (Andrews 1974; Dowdall 2011; Research for Action 2013; Dowdall 2013). One-time revenues from school building sales also have proved lower than expected (Dowdall 2013).
The benefits of closures for students fall short, and closures’ largely negative impacts disproportionately affect low-income students and students of color (Research for Action 2013; Valencia 1984). In general, forced mobility from one school to another can be detrimental to student learning and classroom dynamics (Welsh 2017). Studies suggest that at least in the short term, closures result in negative impacts on students’ test scores, sense of belonging, stress levels, attendance, and graduation rates (Kirshner and Pozzoboni 2011; Lipman and Person 2007; Research for Action 2013; Sunderman and Payne 2009; de la Torre and Gwynne 2009; Valencia 1985; Sunderman, Coghlan, and Mintrop 2017). The negative impacts on academic performance of moving schools may diminish over time if students are reassigned to higher quality schools, but that placement is far from guaranteed (Engberg et al. 2012; Carlson and Lavertu 2015; de la Torre et al. 2015; de la Torre and Gwynne 2009; Han et al. 2017). While studies find minimal to no spillover effects on receiving schools’ students (Steinberg and MacDonald 2016; Engberg et al. 2012), school closures and subsequent student reassignments may lead to increased racial segregation across schools (Siegel-Hawley, Bridges, and Shields 2016).
By defining the community as those affiliated with the school site (i.e., parents, students, teachers, and alumni), we know less about how closures affect nonschool stakeholders. Only a few studies have examined closures’ impacts on community and belonging. They emphasize the links between place-based and school identities and suggest that closures harm these ties and social connections (Witten et al. 2001; Kearns et al. 2010; Witten, McCreanor, and Kearns 2007; Good 2016a).
In this study, I move beyond prior considerations of closures’ catalysts, decision-making processes, and student-level impacts to examine the broader narrative frames of closures, sales, and reuse that circulate among decision makers and residents. Looking at the ways people interpret closing schools, building disposition, and redevelopment sheds light on the processes and relationships between school district and educational planning and urban change more broadly.
I rely on theories that consider policy a “discursive struggle” (Fischer and Forester 1993, 1). When people talk about policy issues, they point to selective facts, which define problems in particular ways and circumscribe the options for public action (Ball 1993; Schon and Rein 1995; Rein and Schon 1993; Ladson-Billings 2009). These narrative or discursive constructions reflect underlying values, which allow people to “make the ‘normative leap’ from data to recommendations, from fact to values, from ‘is’ to ‘ought’” (Schon and Rein 1995, 26).
Discourse is meaningful because it contributes to material conditions, meaning-making, and lived experiences of the city (Weber 2002; Gowan 2010). In other words, “talk-action-things are mutually constitutive” (Beauregard 2015, 70) and “acting is always a matter of both discursive understandings and material engagements” (Beauregard 2015, 6–7). In the context of city planning and urban policy, these understandings and engagements reflect social, political, and emotional dimensions of place, and are “intimately involved with relations of power and the exercise of power” (Fischer and Forester 1993, 7). Because things “embody social relations, even substitute for them” (Beauregard 2015, 70), examining the discursive constructions of schools (as things) reveals how SDP actions constitute the making and unmaking of places, and help connect the politics of place with those of education.
School District of Philadelphia Context and Challenges
The School District of Philadelphia (SDP) is the eighth largest district in the country, and serves just under 200,000 predominantly low-income students of color. Over 80 percent of students come from families living in poverty (School District of Philadelphia 2014), an unsurprising fact given that Philadelphia’s overall poverty rate is 26 percent and one in every 2.5 children live in poverty (City of Philadelphia 2013). Eighty-six percent of SDP students are students of color (School District of Philadelphia 2014). These student demographics do not mirror the demographics of Philadelphia’s total or under-18 population. For example, SDP educates a disproportionate number of African American children (56 percent), compared with the proportion of African American children in the city overall (26 percent) (National Center for Education Statistics 2016; US Census Bureau 2015).
Studies have shown that children living in poverty perform less well on academic achievement tests (Reardon 2011), and Philadelphia’s students are no exception. In the 2014–15 school year, only 17 percent of students were proficient or advanced in math, 32 percent proficient or advanced in English language arts (ELA) (Pennsylvania Department of Education 2015). 4 Economically disadvantaged students scored lower on both tests as compared to their non–economically disadvantaged counterparts. 5 Philadelphia also struggles with a racial achievement gap, where African American and Latinx students score lower than their White and Asian counterparts. 6
Compounding academic performance challenges, SDP has lost students over the past decade. Enrollment decline is due in part to Philadelphia’s total and school-aged population loss; between 1970 and 2010, the city lost approximately one-quarter of its residents, and nearly half of its school-aged population. Further exacerbating these losses, charter school enrollment has more than tripled in the past decade, drawing over 30 percent of Philadelphia’s public school students (and their per capita funding) from district-run to charter-run schools. 7
Fewer students mean underused school buildings. In 2011, SDP had 70,000 “empty seats” across the district. Enrollment declines and school building utilization have never been uniform across the city. Some neighborhoods gain, while others lose population. Many experience racial and ethnic turnover and others face underdevelopment by private and public actors. 8 An analysis completed in response to the district’s 2013 proposed closures found that neighborhoods in the Northeast section of the city saw 100 percent utilization, while those in other parts of the city ranged from 55 to 68 percent (Dowdall 2011).
Even well-utilized school buildings are not in good condition. In 2011, the average age of SDP school buildings was 63 years, and at least half of its school buildings were built before World War II. More than half of SDP buildings received a rating of “poor” or “fair” on a Facility Condition Index analysis, which “measures the cost of renovation against the cost of replacement” (Dowdall 2011, 5). Recent analyses have identified extensive environmental hazards in schools, including peeling lead paint, lead-contaminated drinking water, asbestos, and mold (Laker, Ruderman, and Purcell 2018). More than 200 school buildings—all owned and maintained by SDP—blanket Philadelphia’s neighborhoods, punctuating a predominantly residential fabric of row-homes. Most students attend school in the neighborhood in which they live.
The school district’s governance structure closely ties its funding and decision making to that of the city. In December 2001, after years of declining enrollment and fiscal challenges, the Pennsylvania state legislature dissolved the Philadelphia School Board and replaced it with the School Reform Commission (SRC), which includes three gubernatorial and two mayoral appointees. 9 SDP cannot levy taxes or sell its own bonds, so remains dependent on City Council, the state, and the federal government for funding. Over 42 percent of the district’s annual budget comes from local revenue sources, which must be approved by City Council (Griffith and Millard 2015). In 2012, the city and the school district had more than $290 million of outstanding delinquent taxes on 102,789 properties (nearly 18 percent of the city’s taxable real estate); including interest and penalties, this figure totals over $500 million (Ginsberg 2013). Coupled with declining state expenditures, the district has struggled to meet the needs of its very high-needs student population for decades.
Given these factors—struggling academic performance, declining enrollments, poor building conditions, and ongoing budget issues—SDP argued that school closures would help improve fiscal health. Fewer schools would mean lower operations and maintenance expenses, and selling surplus buildings would provide one-time cash revenue. Leaders also argued that they could reallocate and consolidate spending in fewer schools with more students, which would eventually improve student achievement.
In 2013, SDP voted to close 24 school buildings, which added to an inventory of 22 other surplus properties (School District of Philadelphia 2013a, 2013b). These actions displaced nearly 9,000 predominantly low-income students of color and were more likely to occur in high poverty and African American neighborhoods (Good 2016b). Since 2013, the district has approved the sale of 32 of these buildings, at least half to developers for noneducational purposes.
Philadelphia’s Urban and Planning Contexts
While SDP struggled to manage its school building inventory, Philadelphia’s city planners were grappling with the city’s twin challenges of population growth and development in some neighborhoods and persistent population decline, poverty, and underdevelopment in others. These challenges reflect patterns in other northeastern and Rust Belt cities, which lost jobs and population since the 1950s due to economic restructuring and public policy. These decades of demographic shifts across the Philadelphia region were highly racialized and class based. Plans for highway development and racially discriminatory federal subsidy of suburban development devalued formerly stable neighborhoods, inspiring further flight, particularly of Jewish and other white ethnic residents.
These migration patterns left behind an eroded tax base to support lower-income, predominantly African American communities. Urban renewal, a federal program ostensibly designed to support urban areas, actually disrupted established communities and served the interests of private developers and downtown business district development. Public housing development concentrated African Americans in particular neighborhoods in North, South, and West Philadelphia, many of which were centers of urban uprisings and Philadelphia’s Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
Since the 1980s, corporate headquarters have left Philadelphia for suburban locations, and public and private investments in the 1990s and 2000s targeted neighborhoods in and adjacent to the central business district. Today, these neighborhoods confront rising property values and threaten displacement of long-term residents (Dowdall 2016). While these neighborhoods see new construction and rehabilitation, other neighborhoods further out are home to more than 40,000 vacant parcels of land and an unknown number of vacant buildings.
In June 2011, the City Planning Commission adopted its comprehensive plan, Philadelphia 2035 (“Philadelphia2035 | Citywide Vision” n.d.), and the following year updated its zoning code for the first time since 1962 (“City of Philadelphia: Zoning” n.d.). Philadelphia 2035 called for planning processes in eighteen planning districts to improve neighborhood conditions and access to opportunity for residents.
This study focuses on two planning districts—Lower North and South—which have the highest density of closed schools (see Figure 1). Examining these two areas allows me to surface the complexity and tensions in school closures and building disposition under different conditions. They reflect some of the variation in poverty, income, racial/ethnic composition, and development activity of the city’s dual trajectories (investment and underdevelopment).
Surplus public school buildings by planning district (2015).
The Lower North District is 5.9 square miles, sits just north of downtown, and includes 16 distinct neighborhoods. Home to Temple University, Lower North has seen population decline for the past 50 years, and was the center of many of the city’s urban renewal efforts and home to key leaders in Philadelphia’s Civil Rights and Black Power movements (Countryman 2006). Of the just over 95,000 people in Lower North, 69 percent are African American, and almost half are living in poverty. Median income in 2010 was $16,459, less than half of the city’s median income.
Lower North was home to a number of high-rise public housing projects, which since the 1990s have been redeveloped as lower-density, mixed-income housing. The area still has large swaths of vacant land, housing, and industrial properties. Sixty-six percent of blocks have some vacancy, limiting tax revenue for the city, depressing property values for homeowners, and fostering unsafe spaces for residents. The Reinvestment Fund Market Value Analysis (MVA) categorizes Lower North’s neighborhoods as “distressed” with some “middle” neighborhoods, indicating limited opportunities for private investment. 10 In 2013, five elementary schools closed in the Lower North planning district, adding to the vacancy in the neighborhood. 11 The Lower North District Plan identifies two closed schools in their land use assessment but does not specifically address issues of education or school building sales and reuse in its proposals. The Lower North planning district plan was adopted in May 2014, prior to the start of this study.
The South planning district, just south of downtown, spans 3.98 square miles and seven neighborhoods. The district is densely developed, with few vacant land and properties. The district is primarily residential and lacks open space. The South has a total population of 133,000 residents. The area has historically been home to working class immigrant populations, particularly Irish, Italian, and Jewish. Today, 15.5 percent of residents are foreign-born, coming from China, Hong Kong/Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, and Italy. The poverty rate in the South planning district is 24 percent.
The MVA categorizes South’s neighborhoods as “middle” with some “strong” neighborhoods and a few “distressed” areas on the western part of the planning district. Rising housing values, new construction, new retail, and an influx of white, higher-income residents with higher levels of educational attainment reflect these conditions. The South is home to four closed elementary schools and one closed high school, all of which have been sold to private developers with plans for housing or other noneducational reuses. The South plan identifies schools as historic buildings and opportunity sites for redevelopment to “preserve community landmarks and promote investment in neighborhoods” (City of Philadelphia City Planning Commission 2015, 80). The South planning district plan was in process during this study.
Methods
To construct an inventory of closed school buildings, I triangulated data from the SDP, SRC meeting minutes, and newspaper coverage of closures. I identified 47 school buildings that closed since 2005. 12 I mapped these 47 closed school buildings against the City Planning Commission’s Planning Area Districts and selected the Lower North and South planning districts for deeper inquiry.
I spoke with 118 individuals through a combination of individual and group semistructured formal interviews and informal interviews during participant observation in the neighborhood. Semistructured interviews included specific questions on the school closure process, neighborhood change, and sale and reuse of school buildings. Many interviewees surfaced broader themes of racial justice and city and educational politics over the course of the interview, and I probed these issues further when appropriate. Interviewees included 16 youth and 37 adult residents, 12 school district and 22 city staff, 22 citywide and neighborhood nonprofit organization staff, five real estate developers, and four policy researchers. With the exception one developer, all “nonresident” respondents lived within Philadelphia; their responses represented a mix of professional and personal reflection.
To find relevant community organization staff, I used the city’s list of Registered Community Organizations (RCOs), community-based nonprofits, neighborhood associations, or political groups that have applied for and received official designation by the City Planning Commission. 13 I then contacted RCO leadership by telephone and/or email. I used publicly available contact information and activated dormant social ties for introductions to staff at relevant city and school district departments, quasi-public agencies, think tanks, citywide nonprofits, and foundations. I contacted buyers of closed school buildings by telephone and/or email.
In the South planning district, I left flyers for all (approximately 400) households in a one-block radius of each of four closed school buildings. I also activated dormant social ties with neighborhood nonprofit leaders and block captains. I used snowball sampling to identify additional respondents. Finally, in July 2015, I facilitated a six-week participatory mapping project with 15 high-school aged youth.
During my fieldwork, I lived in the South planning district. I spent time with neighbors in the evenings and on weekends and volunteered at neighborhood and local school events. I attended neighborhood association and public safety meetings in both North and South Philadelphia. I also attended public meetings and hearings of the School Reform Commission, the Zoning Board of Adjustments, the City Planning Commission, City Council, and the Philadelphia Housing Authority. I attended meetings facilitated by developers who had purchased schools and participated in a charrette about closed schools facilitated by the Community Design Collaborative in November 2014. 14
I coded interview transcripts and field notes with MAXQDA qualitative data analysis software. I developed a set of deductive codes as “descriptive” or “provisional” coding (Miles, Huberman, and Saldana 2014), and iterated on these themes using a combination of deductive coding (based on prior research on school closures) and inductive coding (drawing directly from interviewees responses).
Narratives of Closure, Sales, and Reuse
When people tell stories they define problems and by extension establish a universe of potential solutions (Goffman 1974; Schon and Rein 1995; Yanow 2000; Rein and Schon 1993; Ladson-Billings 2009). Following, I present my findings organized around three narrative frames of Philadelphia’s schools, closures, and building disposition; one is dominated by decision making and two others offer counternarratives. Notably, these stories are not mutually exclusive. Because of my recruitment methods, interviewees do not constitute a representative sample, and each of these stories crosses lines of race, class, gender, neighborhood, or organizational affiliation. The two counternarratives do, however, make explicit the ways in which communities of color, particularly the African American community, suffer disproportionately from school closures and broader patterns of underdevelopment and neglect. These three stories of schools and closure illustrate the ways that the discursive constructions of schools and closures circulated across neighborhoods and a range of Philadelphians.
“You have these hulking enormous buildings that cost a gazillion dollars.”
One way to understand Philadelphia’s closures is as a complex contemporary policy decision necessitated by a combination of very practical concerns for the school district (described above). Since 2010, SDP has put facilities management at the center of creating high-quality schools (School District of Philadelphia 2010, 9). Early drafts of the facilities master plan describe “right-sizing” the district through closures: “By closely matching the number of available seats to current and projected enrollment, we can achieve operational efficiencies and redirect resources into the classroom” (School District of Philadelphia 2010, 7). This explicit reliance on quantitative metrics is not a neutral choice. “Quantification” transforms “the thing being measured . . . into its statistical indicator and displaces political disputes into technical disputes about methods” (Rose 1999, 205). It also divorces schools from any social, cultural, or spatial context; if the value of the school is not quantifiable, it literally and figuratively does not count (Caven 2015).
Monica, a thirty-something African American woman who has worked at SDP for almost 10 years reinforces this framing: We did a really good job on the narrative of we’re financially—we’re in serious financial distress which is why we had to bring a recovery officer in and a consultant and everything else [and] as one of the mechanisms or one of the means to achieve savings, we were going to implement a large amount of school closures.
Here, she understands schools as capital assets or liabilities for SDP’s fiscal health. Monica sees SDP’s dire financial situation (described above) motivating school closures. She also emphasizes the power of storytelling and this particular narrative in convincing people of SDP’s decisions.
SDP’s story persists beyond its staff. Michael, a White, college-educated man in his midthirties, lives with his wife and infant daughter on a South Philadelphia block adjacent to a closed school in the eastern part of the South planning district. He understands “the basics of budgeting and the infrastructure of the city” and reiterates a story of district fiscal crisis: The schools are hemorrhaging money is the chief concern. Ok, we close these schools. What’s going to stop? It’s like putting your finger in a leak in the dam. . . . No one seems to be able to think about long-term fix. . . . I’m really hoping that all of these school closures will lead to someone stepping in and saying, “Here’s the plan to fix Philly schools because we can’t keep going down this path.” [But] I think a lot of people are just like, “Well that’s the beginning of the end and it’s going to fall apart.”
For him, the closures are one intervention, but in the absence of a longer-term plan, he seems skeptical that closures themselves will mitigate the crisis given its scale. Failure or collapse feels inevitable.
The inevitability of school closures suggests a linear path of progress to which Rachel also ascribes. She is a White forty-something mother of an elementary-aged charter school student, who also lives in the eastern part of the South planning district: You have these hulking enormous buildings that cost a gazillion dollars to heat and maintain. People don’t want to say it, and I’ll say it and people would probably hate me for it, but you can’t keep them open just because people in neighborhoods are attached to them. It’s sad, but you can’t have a school building for 1,000 kids with 300 kids in it.
On balance, she concurs with the closure decisions, yet is not personally affected. Her son is in a charter school outside of the neighborhood. Her neighborhood is seeing an increase in middle- and upper-income families (hers included) moving in, and her neighborhood elementary schools are thriving because these families are choosing the local public schools. These neighborhood and school changes are also contributing to increased property values for her and her neighbors.
Not all agree that closures are the best path, but still express the ways that SDP’s process renders closures inevitable. Joan is an African American woman in her early seventies and identifies as third generation South Philadelphian. She lives in the western part of the South planning district, which has a larger African American population than where Rachel lives. Joan feels dismayed by the closures in her neighborhood but also expresses a sense of inevitability: I don’t know if [we] would have been successful [stopping the closure of the neighborhood school] because the school system is about the bottom line, and they had low attendance. It wasn’t cost effective.”
Rachel and Joan reiterate SDP’s story, in which closures are a foregone conclusion based on quantitative metrics of student enrollment and finances.
In addition to cost savings, SDP argued that closures would generate revenue through school building sales. Jennifer, a White SDP employee in her early forties, was not involved in the closure decision making but works on building disposition. She describes how the district “went with the highest bid for each property” because of “the pressure of the financials.” She frames school closures and sales as key to SDP’s fiscal solvency.
SDP’s 2013 revised Adaptive Sale and Reuse policy reflects this approach, and includes a provision for expedited sales of buildings considered to be “High-Level Marketability—properties located in favorable markets that are likely to sell” (School District of Philadelphia 2013c, 2). While the policy claims that SDP will evaluate proposals based on eight criteria, including impact on surrounding neighborhood and community support, the rubric used includes only four criteria: proposed use, financial capacity to complete purchase, purchase price/timing to close on purchase, and experience purchasing/developing real estate (Burns and Hite 2014).
Frank works for the quasi-public agency helping SDP with sales and disposition. He is a White man in his late forties. He lives in Philadelphia, and his children attend Catholic school. He spoke passionately about the urgent need to stabilize the public school system through school closures and sales: I think what the important thing is, from a resource allocation point of view, is to get [schools] off [SDP’s] cost ledger. Because those costs, they’re at a point where if you take a dollar to take an old school from becoming a nightmare, then that’s a dollar that’s not going into an academic program. . . . You have to make hard decisions . . . otherwise you’re going to stay in the closed school business, and every day you stay in the closed school business, you’re not in the open school business. . . . As long as [buildings] continue to languish and be on their books, I think that’s a distraction. It’s a psychological distraction. It’s a resource distraction. It’s a personnel distraction. It’s not a good thing.
This story implies that public education is a zero sum game in which schools are commodities and districts have a finite set of resources to manage them.
Closures and sales transform educational spaces into real estate assets and position the school district as a real estate broker. Roberta, an elected school official, reinforces this point. A White woman in her sixties, she speaks of an agentic market that sets sales price and determines reuses.
People look at the school building and make something of it. They see it as an empty building and project onto it, but in fact it is a vacant building in a micro market. You’re not likely to get far from what the market wants to do with it. . . . To project onto the empty school building or any empty building a purpose beyond which the whole environment and context has some energy, is in most cases a mistake.
Roberta equates schools with any other kind of building in a neighborhood, reifying its transactional value over all others.
Schools as real estate assets may sit in opposition to priorities of the surrounding community. In the case of reuse, Leo, a prominent Philadelphia developer, publicly commented, “You can either move forward and subsidize a use now that will make the community happy, or wait ten years for the market to change. But you can’t have it both ways.” 15 This tension became manifest in SDP’s disposition process, which originally included an avenue for community input, but in its final implementation, prioritized market dynamics and expertise from people like Frank and Jennifer.
The stakeholders—decision makers and others—that define schools as a liability (to SDP) or an asset (to a buyer) elevate an agentic market and render closures and sales inevitable. However, in ceding to the inevitability of market forces, these comments obscure other meanings people hold for schools, the racialized dynamics of neighborhood and school politics, and generations of discriminatory policies and practices.
“It unravels those community ties.”
Mark is an African American man in his late thirties, who grew up in North Philadelphia and runs a nonprofit organization in the western, more underdeveloped part of the South planning district. His reflections on school closures are both personal and professional.
Where I live now is less than a mile away from where I went to middle school, which is now closed. Actually two of my schools that I went to are now two of the schools that closed. It’s really sad . . . for alumni, we lost a home.
Mark’s lament emphasizes the role schools play not only for students, but also for the broader community, especially alumni. Sean, a 40-something White police officer, echoes this sentiment. A lifelong Philadelphian, he works in the South planning district and witnessed the impacts of school closure in the neighborhood: There’s a certain sadness to it. People do lose their sense of belonging. You know, look at the school just around the corner from here. . . . It’s sad to see. . . . I think there’s a sort of sadness in the neighborhood when a school closes because you do lose a bit of your identity.
Few dispute this loss and the pain closures inflict on communities. Monica, the SDP employee, describes how she considered this deep loss when crafting the closure process: When you’re dealing with a community that could potentially be inheriting a sort of forever loss, there’s time that they just need to be able to try to change your mind or if it looks like that’s not going to happen, be able to internalize it, be able to be in a position to talk about transition with you.
This “forever loss” that Monica identifies and that Mark and Sean describe for neighborhoods, point to the braided relationship between a school’s current and historic social community and the physicality of the school building.
Laura, an African American woman in her midthirties, is a resident of North Philadelphia and works for her City Councilperson. She naturalizes this connection between social and physical community and sees schools as key places that help young people navigate their neighborhood: Philly is a city of neighborhoods, right? And schools are a very, very important part of that neighborhood concept for young children—that security of knowing what is your neighborhood, who are the people in your neighborhood. . . . It’s all a part of that “this is home beyond your house” feeling. This is my block. Not just this is your block but this is your neighborhood, and these are the things I can identify in my neighborhood. I can identify the grocery store. I can identify the school. I can identify the barbershop and the doctor’s office.
Schools serve an important role in neighborhoods, helping young people “be known” and cultivating a neighborhood-based identity. Laura continues to describe how closures are therefore not only sad for students and the school community, but profoundly disruptive to the social fabric of the neighborhood: Now the thing that brings people together outside of their houses, where you congregate, where you meet your neighbors is gone. . . . When you lose that . . . it unravels those community ties. There are less opportunities for people to meet and to congregate. When you drop off your child at school, that’s when you get to see someone else, or you might meet a neighbor down the street. . . . Those natural outlets don’t exist anymore when you take that [school] away.
Laura echoes prior research on schools as physical and social anchor institutions (“Coalition for Community Schools” n.d.; Taylor, McGlynn, and Luter 2014; Lawhon 2009; Vitiello 2006; Vincent 2006). Schools foster a sense of belonging (Kirshner, Gaertner, and Pozzoboni 2010; Witten, McCreanor, and Kearns 2007), facilitate social capital building (Nast and Blokland 2013; Sampson 2011; Warren 2014), and are instrumental in political identity development (Nuamah 2016; Stone 2001). When schools close, communities are bereft of a place to foster these kinds of connections.
Seth does not have children yet, but echoes Laura’s thoughts about neighborhood schools when he says, “I would love to send my kid to a neighborhood school for all the reasons that—it’s obvious. . . . I’d love to have a community where all the neighbors are my kids’ friends.” But Seth’s opinion is complicated by his intellectual and professional commitment to market-based education reform efforts that aim to shutter “failing” schools. He is a White thirty-something who runs an education reform advocacy group. Although he sees the benefits of neighborhood-based schools, he levies a biting critique of those who emphasize neighborhood connections at the expense of his preferred quantitative metrics of educational quality: A lot of what folks want out of neighborhood schools is nostalgia for a system that didn’t ever—that doesn’t exist. Which is this belief that before [the governor] or before charter schools, that black families in North Philly had this golden era where they sent their kids to—they walked their kids to school, and the crossing guard knew their name, and things were great. It’s like, no. These schools have been failing for decades, multiple generations. And families still feel a romantic attachment to them, because it’s their school, but it’s important to recognize that those schools hadn’t produced results for a long time.
Seth thus acknowledges the story of schools and closures that Laura, Mark, and Sean articulate. He suggests, however, that the quantitative metrics used to assess school quality are a more legitimate tool to determine a school’s value to a community.
Because schools are gathering, recreational, or open spaces, closures mean that neighborhoods are left with fewer community amenities. SDP personnel also acknowledge, but ultimately dismiss, this impact on the neighborhood as an important metric for SDP to consider. Roberta, the elected school official, affirmed that closures are “tragic” and “horrible” for neighborhoods, but also explained that the impact on the surrounding neighborhood is “never going to be the determining factor [for SDP] because our mission is education.” She positions education as what happens inside of school buildings, not beyond its walls.
This clear demarcation for SDP leaves the planning department to pick up the pieces of a less well-resourced neighborhood. Sara, a White woman in her late twenties, works for the City Planning Commission. She is a newly minted planner in her first job out of graduate school. When asked about the links between planning processes and closed schools, Sara did not have any specific ideas, but she later acknowledged that her team needs to ask, “with these schools going away, what services do they provide to the community that they’re missing?” Previously taken for granted, these school spaces served core community development functions, and their closures present unexpected burdens to neighborhood planning efforts. Sara realizes that the planning department must figure out how to fill gaps in the social fabric of neighborhoods that closures create.
Sara’s colleague, Andy, has been working for the Planning Commission for a bit longer. He is a White man in his forties. He is not originally from Philadelphia. His provenance is notable, he comments, because his outsider status can challenge trust-building with some long-term African American residents with whom he works in North Philadelphia; consistency and transparency help bridge the divide. Andy saw from early on that the school district “just wasn’t thinking about those wider neighborhood implications.” For example, during an asset mapping exercise in the Lower North area, participants realized that within the neighborhood planning boundaries, there were no open schools, a shocking realization for the residents. Andy suggests that SDP’s process for reassigning students to new schools after closures was a “missed opportunity” to collaborate with the planning department: [SDP] has just gotten hammered because it doesn’t seem as though they considered fully the amount of distance students would have to walk to these new schools. You know the catchment areas that they redrew—that’s something we could have helped them with.
Andy implies that he and his planning colleagues have a clearer understanding of residents’ mental maps of their neighborhoods than SDP staff. That is not to say that SDP staff does not think spatially. Monica, in fact, is emphatic that any closure decisions must include a spatial dimension, exclaiming, “You can’t [close schools] and not look at a map . . . you just can’t do it! It’s kind of an important thing. Like just start by looking at a map!” She reports that SDP wanted to ensure that a receiving school was within one-half mile or five city blocks of the closed school.
As Andy alludes to, a straight calculation of distance does not necessarily match the mental maps of residents, however. Serena, a White woman in her forties, who works for the city, captures the concerns: That your child could walk into another neighborhood, that’s scary for the child and family. In North Philadelphia it’s a very big issue—block-to-block, even across the street—is a whole different world.
As Serena explains, in some parts of Philadelphia, neighborhood boundaries are very small, and for some, deeply tied to where their children attend a neighborhood school. Closures yield concerns about safe passage because of distance to new schools. But beyond that, neighborhood conditions and social dynamics shape residents’ mental maps of safe passage through and across neighborhoods.
“It means divestment.”
School buildings are deeply tied to collective memory, history, and identity. Mark, the nonprofit leader in South Philadelphia, speaks of this collective memory in deeply personal terms: “Where do we go to get back to where we came from? It’s almost like erasing your history. Well that’s the way it feels to me.”
Schools also embody and symbolize years of struggle for marginalized communities, particularly in light of the racialized history of underdevelopment in these neighborhoods. Laura (the City Council staffer) elaborates on one such site in North Philadelphia that was spared from closure: That educational complex is symbolic to the community in that it was built 30 or 40 years ago as the Dr. Ruth Wright Hare Educational Complex. Dr. Ruth Wright Hare is the first African American woman to be a principal in the City of Philadelphia. . . . [Also] it’s a building that during its construction was a site for protest because minorities weren’t involved in the construction . . . that’s how meaningful it was for them.
Closing this school would have disrespected the history of the black community’s protest and struggle for integration in labor, schools, and housing.
For Joan in South Philadelphia, the inequitable distribution of political power that inspired those protests in the 1960s and ’70s persists today, and manifests during the school closure process. SDP closed her neighborhood school with predominantly lower-income African American children but left open a school in the adjacent neighborhood with a growing higher income, White population, and a very active parent group: It does make a difference if the community is majority people of color. You don’t get things as quickly as if the community is predominantly White or another ethnic group. It makes a big difference and that’s reality.
The closure process—rather than the building—embodies persistent racial inequities in power across Philadelphia’s communities.
For others, the school building disposition and reuse plans carry meaning as part of larger patterns of underdevelopment. Laura emphasizes that her constituents in North Philadelphia have “seen disinvestment in other ways—their rec centers or their public libraries or their local corner stores have moved out or have been closed for some reason.” In this context, school closures, she says, are “just another dagger to that community.”
Pamela is one of Laura’s constituents. She is in her sixties and a community leader in the Lower North planning area and other parts of North Philadelphia. When asked what school closures mean to her neighborhood, she says, “It means divestment. That’s really what it means.” Private reuses or redevelopment serve as a painful symbol of government disinvestment in civic, public-serving institutions.
Some experience closures as an attack on Philadelphia’s most disenfranchised communities. Alicia, a block captain, lives in the western part of the South planning district directly across the street from a closed school. She organizes community cleanups and hosts discussions around the closed school. She and two of her neighbors, Deanna and Marie, shared their perspectives on the school, its closure, and its reuse. All three are African American women, and they range in age from fifties through seventies. Alicia is the “newcomer,” having lived on the block for the past 10 years. Deanna and Marie have been in the neighborhood since childhood. They express concerns that the public school will be converted for a private use such as condominiums. Deanna repeatedly says that the community wants a school or a community space, not more housing, especially considering gentrification in the neighborhood.
They tie their criticisms of private reuse to other longstanding concerns beyond closures. Alicia, Deanna, and Marie express skepticism of the ways the city and private developers have engaged (or not) the community on past projects. They feel their objections to increased development, the changing culture of the neighborhood, and constraints on parking go ignored.
Back in North Philadelphia, Pamela echoes these feelings of disrespect, and extends her concerns beyond private developers to city leaders. Elected and appointed officials have disrespected the community through planning and development, including the school disposition process. The repeated disrespect erodes Pamela’s trust in SDP and city government.
I’m supposed to trust you when you make those kinds of deals [for school sales]? Hell no—I’m not trusting you—no, no. You haven’t done anything to fix up our neighborhood at all. You have contempt for our neighborhood—the very neighborhood that [elected you].
Pamela is less concerned with what the open school embodies or what the specific reuse of the closed school will be. Rather, she focuses on how the closures and sales processes reflect the problematic relationship between the public sector and the community: It’s so much larger than the reuse of buildings. . . . There’s a lot of good examples of reuse of buildings as apartments and things of that sort. . . . It’s like you’re not being told what the real plan is in terms of land reuse. It’s so vast—the disposition of these properties. And there’s so many properties and it’s so vast and not being told the big picture is problematic.
Like Alicia, Deanna, and Marie, Pamela answers questions about school reuse by elaborating on broader plans for redevelopment, conflating actions of SDP with those of other public agencies: The City Planning Commission hasn’t looked out for us. The Office of Housing hasn’t looked out for us. The Council people haven’t looked out for us. The ward leaders, committee people—nobody’s looking out for us. So what the hell makes me think that I can go to a meeting, sign a sign-in sheet, look at your plans and charts and say, “Wow, that’s going to help us”? No it’s not. . . . That s**t looks good on paper. It looks good for documenting that there was a process. And you use that to process people out of position. That’s what has consistently happened.
The substance and tone of Pamela’s response is angry and righteous, as she draws connections between public school closures, school reuse, and other public agencies’ efforts at housing development and neighborhood revitalization.
Across town, Elizabeth, a twenty-something, White, Jewish, self-described “radical” woman recently bought a house. As a community and labor organizer, she expresses discomfort with her role as a gentrifier in the western part of the South planning district, which is home to predominantly lower-income and African-American households. Elizabeth also draws broad linkages between school closures and other neighborhood and societal inequities, such as gentrification, unfair wages, and structural racism: I mean all of these struggles are connected, right? So they close our schools and then they tell kids, “Why don’t you just get a better job?” And then kids are all on the street selling drugs because they need to make money and that’s bad for your community, it’s bad for your neighborhood—obviously all these things are related. Trying to compartmentalize them to me doesn’t make sense. So when they close schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods, that to me is an attack on the Black working class people. Meanwhile, in that same neighborhood, they’re selling half a million dollar houses. And they’re going to turn these empty schools into f***ing condos?
She echoes others’ concerns about the changing use of a public school into private housing. For Elizabeth, like Pamela, Deanna, and others, school closures, sales, and reuse do not stand alone, but rather are situated alongside decades of publicly sponsored plans and policies. While open schools represent a public commitment to a civic institution, closed schools symbolize multigenerational and persistent divestment, disrespect, and dispossession.
Discussion and Conclusion
This study uncovers divergent narratives of school closures and building disposition and ties these stories to the material stakes of urban change. Their convergences and conflicts illustrate the “constant discursive struggle” and attendant power dynamics of education and urban policy making (Fischer and Forester 1993). The first story of closures, sales, and reuse uses quantification and recasts school buildings from places of shared meanings and collective memories to commodities, financial liabilities or revenue, and real estate assets. By turning schools from “places” to “sites” (Beauregard 2012, 2015, 90–91), SDP deploys the tools and technologies of planning (maps, financial analyses, models, etc.) in order to “take the world as it is initially experienced and reimagine it in terms of categories that enable them to develop plans and regulations that frame subsequent interventions” (Beauregard 2015, 32). Operating with a scarcity mentality and a preoccupation with austerity measures, closures and disposition become an inevitable response to the city’s demographic changes, the school district’s fiscal and operational crises, and an agentic market.
Filled with sadness and anger, two counternarratives emphasize the relational meaning, rather than monetary value of schools, and highlight how schools are educational, social, and political infrastructure in neighborhoods. They draw out the ways school buildings embody collective memory. They challenge conventional definitions of impacts that myopically focus on fiscal efficiency and quantitative academic achievement. These stories articulate the ways that losing a school changes daily rhythms of neighborhood life, obliterates neighborhood social resources, harms spaces of belonging, and perpetuates state-sponsored racial discrimination in the name of urban revitalization. For some, school closures and their disposition represent an instantiation of state-sponsored dispossession.
These stories point to competing moral values of schools embodied through their materiality, functionality, and meaning (Beauregard 2015, 64) across both time and space. While not necessarily deployed with racist intent, school closures, sales, and reuse erase African American communities’ multigenerational experiences of schooling (Khalifa et al. 2014), and reinforce experiences of their “social suffering” in public schools and neighborhoods (Dumas 2014). They extend beyond the walls of the school building to the broader neighborhood and demonstrate how for some without decision-making authority “remembering the past is an essential component of making sense of the present” (Doran 2017, 2).
In Philadelphia, SDP and city staff with power to make final decisions about school closures and building disposition privileged economic efficiency and quantifiable metrics, devaluing schools’ literal and figurative centrality in neighborhoods. Prior research has shown that school communities in Philadelphia that used these kinds of tools to fight closures were more likely to have their schools saved (Caven 2015). Regardless of who uses it, this approach perpetuates an ahistorical approach to urban change and sits in sharp contrast to the historically sensitive lived experience of schools and their closures at the neighborhood level.
Schools are not only important to educational struggles, but also are key sites of contestation in the politics of place and neighborhood change. The politics of education and those of place are not distinct, and by extension, lines of accountability are blurred. As residents conflate actions of the school district with those of other public agencies (e.g., planning, housing authority, city council), planners may need to consider their responsibilities and approaches in a new light and specifically seek out contested views of reality that may be “only partially revealed” to them (Beauregard 2015, 102). For example, traditional planning tends to focus on neighborhood, city, or regional boundaries and the ways that people reflect these administrative boundaries in their daily experience. As the two counternarratives of schools and closures illustrate, school catchment areas may be as important as traditional notions of neighborhood in shaping people’s daily experience and meaning-making.
The “purpose of planning is to modify, regulate, or bring into existence a thing and the relationships in which it is entangled” (Beauregard 2015, 70). However, in Philadelphia, SDP deployed the tools of planning to bring schools out of existence, arguably ignoring or disrupting already existing relationships. This process challenges traditional planning research and practice to take seriously education decision making as a domain of planning and urban politics. The repercussions of school facilities management directly affect the social and spatial dynamics of neighborhoods, and thus impel planners to explore ways to meaningfully and proactively coordinate traditional planning efforts with those of school districts. Studying mass school closures, sales, and reuse reveals how school districts are deeply engaged in the making and unmaking of places, and the ways in which they deploy the formal tools of planning to legitimize their decisions. Because of the irreversible imprint on surrounding areas, school closures and building disposition are not merely education reform efforts, but also an important component of urban planning.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the editors and anonymous reviewers for their thorough and thoughtful feedback.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was sponsored by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation and the University of California Hellman Fellows Fund Graduate Award.