Neighborhood Schools and Community Development: Revealing the Intersections through the Philadelphia School Closure Debate

Abstract

Spanish

Chinese

This article reveals intersections between schools and community development through analysis of a school closure debate in Philadelphia. Despite their interconnection, efforts to improve schools and neighborhoods have remained substantially siloed. Empirically, the article explores the ways neighborhood stakeholders framed the implications of recommended school closures in terms of the social, institutional, economic, and physical domains of their neighborhoods. The data include video records of community meetings held during the closure debate during winter 2012–2013 and subsequent interviews conducted with neighborhood stakeholders. The analysis outlines an agenda for community development scholars and practitioners to proactively engage with neighborhood schools.

Keywords

community development neighborhood planning school closure school facilities school reform

Introduction

Community development in the United States encompasses a wide array of efforts to improve communities at a local scale. Community development scholarship within planning, however, has largely ignored the significance of public schools and choice-driven school reform for local communities. This is surprising, given the breadth of community development practice and the recognition within the field of the diverse processes that intersect to shape the lives of local residents. With some notable exceptions (e.g., Baum 2003; Bierbaum 2018b; Silverman 2014a; Vincent 2014), planning scholars have not engaged the roles schools play in neighborhoods or the community implications of policy changes that have dramatically altered the structure and governance of public education in the United States over the past two decades.

This article examines community responses to school closures in Philadelphia to reveal the intersections community members identified between neighborhood schools and core domains of community development practice. That is, the closure process is not the focus of this study; rather, it serves as a catalyzing event that prompted community members to articulate the particular ways that they understood their school to matter for their community. I argue that these intersections provide guidance for how community development scholars and practitioners should begin more actively engaging with local schools.

The conditions of schools and neighborhoods are intertwined, and schools have implications for local and regional development trajectories (Baum 2004; Silverman 2014b; Vincent 2006). Poor communities of color in U.S. cities have for generations fought the limitations of under-resourced neighborhood schools (Anyon 2014; Logan and Burdick-Will 2015; Squires and Kubrin 2005). And yet, there has remained a persistent divide between efforts to improve schools and efforts to improve neighborhoods. As Taylor (2005) argued, school reform in the United States has become separated from its roots in the 1960s fights for community control, morphing into a building-focused approach that ignores neighborhood conditions. Conversely, the field of community development has focused on practically everything but schools, tracing a parallel arc from community power building to professionalized service provision across a breadth of local needs, although particularly in the arenas of housing and economic development (Newman and Lake 2006). Although it is beginning to change, engaging with schools has not been part of this agenda (see, for example, Naimark 2015).

Some scholars have called for greater integration of education and neighborhood initiatives, seeing benefit for both schools and communities (e.g., Noguera 1996; Silverman 2014a; Warren 2005). Others have argued that schools and school buildings should be conceptualized as tools (Chung 2002) or assets (Kretzmann 1992) for community development. These voices, however, remain peripheral. I argue that community development scholars and practitioners should find ways to bridge this gap and to integrate engagement with schools into the broader scope of their work. Failure to make these connections and to integrate them into community development theory and practice means that the negative consequences of struggling public schools for poor communities are bemoaned but never grasped as potential lines of engagement with the capacity to strengthen both schools and communities. In this paper, I argue that the breadth of significance that residents attribute to schools reveals potential avenues for community development efforts to engage with schools in mutually beneficial ways.

In 2013, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), facing a fiscal crisis and declining enrollment, sought to close approximately one-sixth of the schools it operated. In identifying schools to be closed, the District prioritized maximizing fiscal savings and educational effectiveness. What the District’s closure process did not address were the broader implications of school closures for neighborhoods. Neighborhood stakeholders,¹ however, made these connections, protesting the ramifications they foresaw for their communities. In this article, I describe the intersections that neighborhood stakeholders drew between school closures and four core arenas of community development practice: the social, institutional, economic, and physical domains of their neighborhoods. That is, the research aims not to characterize the full scope of arguments made for and against school closures, nor to evaluate the efficacy of Philadelphia’s school closure process, but rather to identify and describe the ways stakeholders framed closures as relevant to neighborhood social, institutional, economic, and physical domains. By doing so, this paper reveals specific areas of intersection and possibilities for intervention, proposing priority starting points for community development scholars and practitioners to begin more actively engaging with neighborhood schools. The analysis reveals the following:

Within the social domain, stakeholders framed schools as social hubs and sources of social support.

Within the institutional domain, stakeholders protested the loss of a neighborhood organization in places where there are few.

Within the economic domain, stakeholders tied schools to neighborhood development trajectories and decried effects of closures on local businesses and real estate.

Within the physical domain, stakeholders denounced the creation of another large, vacant building and the potential for such buildings to be redeveloped for purposes not in the community’s interest.

The connections evidenced in these findings between schools and community development underscore the community development potential inherent within an infrastructure of publicly owned neighborhood schools. In an era when many cities are dismantling this infrastructure, an agenda probing these possibilities is needed within planning and community development scholarship and practice.

The article proceeds along these lines. The next section briefly reviews literature engaging the community implications of school closures, followed by a section framing four domains of community development practice to organize the empirical analysis. The fourth section provides background on the 2013 school closures in Philadelphia and a description of methods. The next section draws on qualitative data to describe the ways neighborhood stakeholders framed schools slated for closure in terms of the social, institutional, economic, and physical domains of their neighborhoods. A closing discussion outlines a research agenda to support bridging the divide between school improvement and community development efforts.

School Closures and Local Communities

Demographic shifts have always caused schools to close. However, the recent mass school closures in cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York are not attributable solely to population changes, but represent the consequence of expanding choice policies and charter school sectors that draw students and resources away from traditional public schools (Bierbaum 2018b; Lipman 2011b; Nuamah 2017; Weber, Farmer, and Donoghue 2018). Such closures have multifaceted implications for school districts, students, families, and local communities. While some scholarship in education and economics has explored the consequences of closures for students and student performance (e.g., Brummet 2014; Kirshner and Pozzoboni 2011), the historic gap between community development and schools is evidenced in the paucity of planning and community development scholarship considering the implications of mass school closures for local neighborhoods. By probing the connections community members drew between school closures and neighborhood concerns, this article contributes to a growing, interdisciplinary literature that is engaging school closures from the perspective of local communities, including (1) work framing closures as manifestations of the broader neoliberalization of urban space (Buras 2013; Johnson 2013; Lipman 2011a, 2011b), (2) research exploring where schools are closing and what populations are affected (Burdick-Will, Keels, and Schuble 2013; Good 2017b; Weber, Farmer, and Donoghue 2018), and (3) studies focusing on the politics of closure processes and their resistance by opponents (Bierbaum 2018a, 2018b; Good 2017a; Irwin and Seasons 2012; Kretchmar 2014; Nuamah 2017; Pappas 2012). Here I briefly review (4) scholarship probing the consequences of closures for local communities.

Witten, Kearns, McCreanor, and colleagues published an array of research during the 2000s exploring the implications of urban and rural school closures in New Zealand for local communities (Kearns et al. 2009; Witten et al. 2003; Witten, McCreanor, and Kearns 2007; Witten et al. 2001). They argued that schools play important roles as neighborhood institutions, as pieces of the public social service infrastructure, and as spaces of community connection and relationship building. In her study of a school closure process in Ontario, Canada, Basu (2007, 116) reported that residents made similar arguments, highlighting their local school’s long-term importance to their neighborhood as an institutional resource—a dimension of value not captured by enrollment-based closure decisions. Others studying closures in both urban and rural settings have highlighted the roles schools play as hubs of community relational networks (Bondi 1987; Oncescu and Giles 2014), some tying neighborhood schools explicitly to social capital development (Brinig and Garnett 2010; Fischel 2006; Witten, McCreanor, and Kearns 2007). Along similar lines, Deeds and Pattillo (2015) described how students and parents experienced school closure as the disruption of a social network. This body of research reveals that for many communities, schools not only are spaces of education but also constitute critical resources across multiple neighborhood domains.

In this article, I contribute to the literature situating the implications of school closures within the context of local communities. More specifically, I draw on the ways that community members described the implications of closures for their neighborhoods to outline a set of priorities for how community development practitioners and scholars should begin to bridge the historic disconnect between community development and local schools.

Domains of Community Development Practice

The field of community development focuses on investing and cultivating social, economic, and political resources in low-income and disinvested neighborhoods. Spanning a range of normative motivations (Ganapati 2008; Wolf-Powers 2014), this work includes efforts to strengthen the neighborhood social fabric, to organize residents to affect external power structures, and to leverage resources into the community (Sites, Chaskin, and Parks 2007). Although in recent decades often associated with efforts to build affordable housing, community development planners and practitioners work across many place-based domains, including social capital development, civic-capacity building, social service provision, organizational development, nonprofit capacity building, community development finance, workforce development, entrepreneurship support, streetscape improvement, environmental resource protection, and parks and recreational infrastructure development (see DeFilippis and Saegert 2012; G. P. Green and Haines 2016). For the purposes of this paper, I organize this breadth of work within four dimensions of place: social, institutional, economic, and physical.

Community development in the social domain focuses on the strength and character of the relationships that connect people to each other and the provision of services to meet social needs (Saegert, Thompson, and Warren 2001; Sampson 2012).

Community development in the institutional domain can be inward- or outward-focused. Neighborhood organizations² can build community connections and mediate between diverse groups (Ferman and Kaylor 2001; Hum 2010). They can also amplify political voice and facilitate access to external resources (Marwell 2007; Small 2006).

Community developers working in the economic domain conceptualize neighborhoods in terms of economic processes, seeking to cultivate local economic growth and to leverage resources into a neighborhood (Boothroyd and Davis 1993; Wiewel, Teitz, and Giloth 2012).

Community development in the physical domain is concerned with how the built and natural environments affect life for residents (Anguelovski 2013; Harwood 2003).

I delineate these four domains of community development as an organizing framework for the empirical analysis below, in which I consider how neighborhood stakeholders protesting the closure of local schools represented school closures as issues relevant to the work of community development. That is, how did stakeholders relate school closures to the social, institutional, economic, and physical domains of their neighborhoods?

Background and Methods

Following a state-takeover of Philadelphia’s public schools in 2002, public education in Philadelphia transitioned increasingly toward a “diverse provider” model, in which a variety of private entities manage publicly funded schools, resulting in a dramatic expansion of charter schools in the city (see Gill et al. 2007). By 2012, 27 percent of all publicly funded students attended charter schools (Pennsylvania Department of Education 2002–2013a, 2002–2013b). The move toward charter schools accompanied a broader trend toward increasing school choice within the city, where students of all ages—and particularly in high school—commute significant distances to schools other than their in-boundary neighborhood school.

In April 2012, the SDP announced a five-year plan that included closing up to forty schools the following year and sixty-four schools over the subsequent five years. The plan would further shrink an already bare-bones central office and expand the charter sector to include 40 percent of public school students in the city (Graham 2012b; Mezzacappa 2012b; SDP 2012). Opponents understood this infrastructural contraction to be a clear step toward the further privatization of public education in Philadelphia (Graham 2012c; Mezzacappa 2012a). From the District’s standpoint, closing schools had become a fiscal necessity in the face of declining enrollments and state funding cuts. As the 2011–2012 school year came to a close, the SDP estimated a cumulative deficit of $1.1 billion dollars over the coming five years (SDP 2012).

In December 2012, Superintendent William Hite released recommendations to close thirty-seven elementary, middle, and high school buildings across the city, which—if approved—would constitute the closure of almost one-sixth of the 240 schools administered by the District. Along with program closures and grade reshuffling at other facilities, the proposed changes were estimated to affect seventeen thousand of the District’s one hundred forty-four thousand students and to reap $28 million in annual savings (Graham 2012a; Herold 2012). Schools recommended for closure were identified based on four school-specific metrics: academic performance, building utilization, building condition, and cost savings. Local groups analyzing the recommendations found that poor and African American students stood to be disproportionately affected by the restructuring (Graham 2013; Socolar 2013). Philadelphia has a strong history of neighborhood identity and community-based action, and the ensuing months saw vigorous public debate in Philadelphia over the proposals, as parents, students, teachers, and community leaders mobilized to protest the closures. In March 2013, the state-appointed School Reform Commission (SRC) voted on a revised list of closure recommendations, approving the closure of twenty-three District-run schools, along with other program relocation and restructuring.

This paper represents part of a larger project exploring the ways neighborhood stakeholders invoked place in protesting school closures in Philadelphia in 2013. The research is structured as an embedded case study of the closure process (Yin 1994), framed around three neighborhoods that had at least one school on the closing list: Germantown, Fairhill, and Mantua. I analyzed video and transcription records of seven public meetings³ the SDP facilitated during the months of December 2012 through March 2013 and public comment at three SRC meetings held during the same window, as well as three days of formal hearings conducted by the SRC in February 2013 and a one-day hearing convened by the Philadelphia City Council Education Committee the same month. In the initial review of this video and documentary data, I identified speakers whose testimony was explicitly place-based, that is testimony that located themselves and their schools in their neighborhood or within the city’s geography more broadly. Testimony from speakers thus identified was transcribed in full.

In addition, I draw on semistructured interviews I conducted during 2014–2015 with parents, teachers, residents, community leaders, pastors, and community organizers. I talked to more than fifty people through formal and informal interviews and a parent focus group. Most of these individuals were affiliated with a school or community in one of the case neighborhoods; a few were part of citywide organizations. The goal of the interviews was to learn, from a variety of perspectives, how the neighborhood responded to the school closure recommendations. I used snowball sampling to identify interviewees, beginning with organizations active in each neighborhood. When permission was given, interviews were recorded and transcribed (in almost all cases, this was so). Notes from nonrecorded interviews were typed immediately following the interview.

Analysis of the qualitative data followed an inductive approach, beginning with a set of codes developed around the larger study’s research questions:

Research Question 1: How have neighborhood stakeholders invoked place in protesting and making sense of school closures?

Research Question 2: How do they understand the significance of their spatial location in the context of this debate?

Research Question 3: How do local stakeholders understand the significance of school closures for their neighborhoods?

The initial coding framework was expanded and refined as related themes emerged from my engagement with the data. The larger study’s analysis revealed that neighborhood stakeholders invoked place in three primary ways: by tying closures to larger racial and political economic processes in the city (see Good 2017b), by asserting the historic importance of a school to their community identity (see Good 2017a), and by recounting the implications of closures for their neighborhoods. In this article, I organize the latter set of responses around four core domains of community development practice to identify points of intersection between community development and schools. That is, I focus specifically on describing the connections that neighborhood stakeholders made between the closure and neighborhood concerns germane to community development practitioners and scholars.

School Closures within Core Community Development Domains

The analysis that follows describes the ways that neighborhood stakeholders protesting and making sense of the closure of local schools framed closures in terms of community development concerns. The four core domains of community development that I have described organize the analysis. I find that neighborhood stakeholders tied school closures to community development concerns by (1) advocating for the role schools play as social hubs, (2) lamenting the loss of neighborhood organizations, (3) protesting the economic spillover effects of closures, and (4) objecting to the large vacant buildings that would result.

Social Domain: Social Hubs and Sources of Support

Some stakeholders wove schools into neighborhood social landscapes by celebrating a school’s role as a relational hub, a space in which relationships are built, supported, and maintained over multiple generations. In protesting the proposed closure of Cooke School at a January 2013 community meeting, a parent and former student attested,

There is a great staff [at Cooke] that not only taught me, my father, and my son, as well as other family members that we have, because this school was a staple of our community for as long as I can remember.

In protesting the school’s closure, this parent framed its value in terms of what it means to the neighborhood. She further suggested that the school’s history deepens its value as a node of community relationships, as new generations of students reinforce the family ties first laid down when their parents or grandparents attended the school.

Others recounted the moves teachers or families made into neighborhoods to be closer to school-based social networks. Speaking at a community meeting in January 2013, a Germantown High School (GHS) alumna said,

They move close to these schools to be close to parents, teachers they know, and their relatives go to these feeder schools. You are breaking up families; you’re breaking up the neighborhood. And this expense needs to be shared amongst the people and we need a moratorium.

This speaker’s comment is notable for her framing of the social consequences of a closure as an expense. Cost saving was the District’s primary rationale for closing schools. The expressed goal was to redirect maintenance savings into improving the quality of education at the remaining schools. Not included in these calculations, this speaker suggested, was the cost of fractured social networks borne by communities in which schools are closed.

Stakeholders also framed the loss of neighborhood schools as the loss of sources of support for families struggling to meet their own social needs. As a former school administrator expressed to me in a May 2015 interview:

They took away from that community—with the closing of that school—an informal social service agency [. . .]⁴ where parents could go and talk to people who understood them. Who, through their children, wanted to help them.

For this administrator, the now-closed school had been a source of assistance for local families in ways that extended beyond the day-to-day education of children, a place where parents could be heard and understood.

At a December 2012 community meeting, a Kinsey School parent drove home the capacity of schools to provide personal support, recounting how the school had sustained her and her family in the wake of personal tragedy:

I am a parent of John L. Kinsey. And I’m also a volunteer. I graduated from Kinsey. Three of my children have already graduated from Kinsey. I have two more boys. In 2005, my husband was murdered. These teachers took care of me and my kids. We are a family. Y’all tearing up families. You know, we love these kids. I volunteer there because I want to give back because they did so much for me.

This parent described the multiple points of connection she has, and has had, with the school: alumna, volunteer, and parent of five current or former Kinsey students. She reported how Kinsey teachers were a source of support, not only for her children but also for herself. Drawing on the metaphor of the school as family, she conveyed the sense of a place of loyalty and mutual support.

A former Fairhill teacher echoed this appreciation of the breadth of support schools can provide for parents in an October 2014 interview:

It was also a vehicle for parents to find assistance in areas where they felt they had no resources—nowhere to go—to get assistance for their child. Their child was having medical or mental ill necessities, they could come to the school and the school can– was able to steer them where to get that help.

This teacher represented the school as a source of referrals to other resources. In neighborhoods like Fairhill, with many nonnative English speakers, the possibility of being pointed toward help by a trusted neighborhood organization can be particularly important.

By lifting out the role schools play as social hubs and places of support for local families, stakeholders emphasized the implications of closures for the neighborhood’s broader social domain. In doing so, they framed the closure debate around issues that have been the focus of planning and community development research and practice, in particular: the fostering of social capital, the cultivation of local relational networks, and the implications of relational ties for social welfare (e.g., Ganapati 2008; Putnam et al. 2004).

Institutional Domain: Community Organizations in Places Where There Are Few

Other neighborhood stakeholders highlighted the role schools played as neighborhood organizations in places with few such resources. By identifying the value of a school as a neighborhood organization, stakeholders pointed to the implications of a school closure within the local institutional domain. For example, a staff member at a small nonprofit in the Fairhill neighborhood told me in a June 2014 interview

The schools are really the strongest institutions. We don’t have a CDC in our neighborhood. It was so beaten down. It’s really like a former war zone. You know, if you could get out, you did get out. So, the schools are the strongest institutions. So, that’s who we work with mostly.

An elder from a church partner of Cooke Elementary School made a similar argument at a January 2013 community meeting. He exhorted Superintendent Hite to recognize the historic role the school had played as a community institution:

In our communities, there are three positive and solid institutions: the church, the school, and the library. Mr. Hite, Cooke has been a vital force in the community. We have no idea, if Cooke is closed, the kind of devastation it will have on the lives– the quality of life in the community and in the life of our children.

Both of these stakeholders, each of them rooted in a local organization, described the importance of schools for the neighborhood’s institutional landscape, characterizing the school as a resource for the community more broadly.

At an SRC hearing in February 2013, a stakeholder representing a Germantown church situated the recommended closure of three Germantown schools in the context of a neighborhood that had lost multiple large institutions:

Our neighborhood has experienced a series of shut downs of major institutions and buildings recently, including the YWCA on Germantown Avenue. If all three of these schools are shut down, the neighborhood would be deprived of anchor institutions that have stabilized this neighborhood over the years.

In her statement, this stakeholder lifted up the capacity of institutions to play stabilizing roles for neighborhoods. By situating the schools alongside other recently closed neighborhood institutions, she emphasized the compounding effect of closures for the community.

For these stakeholders, local schools represented sources of stability and organizational capacity in neighborhoods that have witnessed decades of disinvestment. Furthermore, as a Germantown pastor asserted to me in a September 2014 interview, institutional exodus from a neighborhood can have consequences for a community’s psyche and identity: “I think the most influential [effect on this community of having the school closed] is identity. It’s almost as though the community is being stripped of who they are, because institutions are leaving.”

In the testimony recounted here, neighborhood stakeholders called on the District to recognize the value that schools represent as organizations situated in and serving local neighborhoods. In this way, they aligned their protest of closures with literatures that have theorized the importance of neighborhood organizations for community development, including the roles organizations can play as “a vehicle through which communities act” (Baum 1999, 188), as advocates on behalf of neighborhood interests (Logan and Rabrenovic 1990), and as brokers capable of accessing resources outside the neighborhood (Small 2006).

Economic Domain: Local Businesses and Development Trajectories

Some stakeholders framed closures in terms of their intersection with neighborhood economic landscapes, specifically highlighting the implications of closures for businesses, for real estate, and for neighborhood redevelopment. A former Fulton teacher told me in a July 2014 interview that businesses along Germantown Avenue were worried about losing foot traffic and had put signs in their windows supporting the schools. A local politician relayed the same concern to me in September 2014, describing the apprehension of local business owners:

It was an economic downturn [to have the schools close]. You know, I was having a series of meetings and talking to businesses. And, I mean, a few businesses told me outright, “If Germantown [High School] closed, I’m going to have to close my business.” And actually, we did. There were some businesses that closed [. . .] along Germantown Avenue.

For both of these stakeholders, GHS and Fulton’s closure had negative consequences for neighborhood businesses. They emphasized the ways closures change daytime patterns of foot traffic and retail consumption, as students and teachers end up supporting businesses in other neighborhoods instead.

Others expressed concern that shuttered buildings would sit vacant for years to come, contributing to neighborhood blight and depressing local development trajectories. At the City Council Education Committee’s February 2013 hearing on the closures, the Philadelphia City controller contended that the buildings would be hard to sell and that the District did not have the money to tear them down. He further argued that property values would be hurt, citing a study conducted by the City that found a $2,000 penalty for homes near closed school buildings:

The School District doesn’t have the money to [demolish these school buildings], so the properties are going to become eyesores and become problems for the most part for the neighborhood. [. . .] [The City Policy Director] has determined that people who live in neighborhoods where the school has been shuttered are on average going to lose about $2,000 each on the value of their property. It basically redlines the neighborhood and identifies it as a dying neighborhood.

This testimony situated school closures within neighborhood real estate markets, framing the buildings as economic liabilities for local homeowners that would persist after the closure debate was over. He asserted a direct impact on neighborhood home values, an explicitly local consequence of closures. Notably, he also likened school closures to redlining in the mortgage lending industry, targeted disinvestment that marks neighborhoods as declining.

Operating from a position of significant economic power but invoking a similar line of place-rooted economic argument, Drexel University weighed in on the closure debate in support of a school in the Mantua neighborhood, just north of campus. By fall 2012, when McMichael appeared on the closure list, the university had already invested significant resources in the school as part of a larger effort at neighborhood revitalization. Drexel and its partners saw preserving the school as critical to the neighborhood’s future: were McMichael to close, it would limit their ability to leverage development resources into the neighborhood. This position was laid out for the District in an alternative proposal submitted by Drexel and its partners in February 2013:

[T]he potential closing of McMichael School threatens the plan [. . .] to move forward with a HUD Choice Neighborhoods Implementation submission. [. . .] A HUD Choice Implementation Grant offers up to $30M to address education, employment and housing deficiencies in Mantua. Plans for a 2013 Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhood grant submission would be thwarted as well.

In this case, Drexel and its partners framed the school’s closure in terms of lost development potential, jeopardizing tens of millions of dollars of potential federal investment.

Within neighborhood economic domains, stakeholders framed school closures in terms of their impact on local businesses, the depression of real estate values, and as catalysts for economic development potential. The health of local businesses, economic consequences of vacant properties, and efforts to leverage development monies into a neighborhood all sit squarely within arenas of community development research and practice (e.g., Baum 2000; Bendick and Egan 1993; Immergluck 2012).

Physical Domain: Place Impact and the Politics of Reuse

School buildings are large structures with positions of prominence in many neighborhoods, and some stakeholders pointed to the consequences of their vacancy. For example, at a December 2012 community meeting, a resident framed the closures as continuing a pattern of school-building abandonment:

The old Edison High School has been on fire twice that I know of. The building’s still sitting there. [. . .] We got Roberto Clemente up the street that’s been abandoned for years. We also have another one at Tacony and Bridge Street. [. . .] Squatters are living in both buildings. You’re going to close 37 more schools. We’re going to have squatters in them buildings too. This is a quality of life issue. How long’s it going to take for yous to get rid of these buildings and do something where our neighborhoods aren’t going down?

Explicitly framing the closures as a “quality of life” issue, this resident emphasized the implications of huge vacant buildings for life in the neighborhood.

Making the converse argument, a Germantown resident and former school administrator argued in a July 2014 interview that schools lower neighborhood crime rates:

People came out of the woodwork to argue for the school. [. . .] There was a lot of anger about closing it. Because [. . .] across the street is the old town hall which is also empty, although we’re trying to bring it back. [. . .] That emptiness really does affect the whole community. And, when they’re full and they’re working it lowers the crime rate. It really does. People are there on the streets. They see things. They know what’s going on.

From this resident’s perspective, people were upset about the school’s closure in part because of the implications of another vacant building, crime among them.

In a July 2014 interview, a Fairhill resident discussed reuse of closed school buildings as an opportunity to bring something positive into a neighborhood, noting however that the District’s goal of selling properties on the private market exposes neighborhoods to new uses that may not serve the community’s interests or needs:

[Y]ou know that [vacant] school [building] that burned and burned and burned for like that whole day? [. . .] They tore it down and they’re putting up a shopping mall. [. . .] So, now let’s think about what they could possibly do with [the empty Fairhill School building], because we see it’s for sale. Yeah. So that means that it could privately be bought, which is the goal. But for what? What? What are they going to put in our community next? Besides another church or bar or liquor dispenser.

For this Fairhill resident, the prospect of the shuttered school building’s sale brought little comfort, noting how often the private market failed to bring into the neighborhood those services most needed by the community.

By framing closures in terms of vacant buildings, the types of people and activity they attract, and concerns about community control of their reuse, stakeholders linked the closure debate with issues that have long been a central focus for neighborhood planning and community development (e.g., Raleigh and Galster 2015; Schilling and Logan 2008).

Discussion

Since the 1960s, the modern community development movement in the United States has focused on improving conditions in neighborhoods marginalized from the centers of political and economic power. This work has spanned a breadth of place-based concerns that I have organized in terms of the social, institutional, economic, and physical domains of place. Notably absent from this endeavor—in both scholarship and practice—has been engagement and collaboration with local public schools (Taylor 2005). Likewise, school reform debates in the United States have focused primarily on finding ways to improve what goes on inside school buildings, an enterprise and policy debate that has not adequately acknowledged the condition of the neighborhoods in which schools operate (Warren 2005). In this paper, I have used the voices of neighborhood stakeholders protesting and making sense of the closure of public schools in Philadelphia as a lens through which to illuminate some of the ways that schools intersect with neighborhood concerns. In this section, I consider what these voices reveal in terms of how the community development field might engage with neighborhood schools as pieces of already existing domains of community development practice. Specifically, I outline a research agenda to support building this bridge. Ultimately, I argue that the infrastructure of neighborhood public schools—underfunded and undercut by school choice policies in many urban communities—represents important latent potential for anchoring community development.

The ways stakeholders tied school closures to neighborhood concerns reveal a number of key alignments between community development efforts and the roles schools play in local communities. Neighborhood stakeholders described schools (1) as social hubs and sources of social support, (2) as neighborhood organizations, (3) as supporters of local business and anchors of economic development, and (4) as vacant buildings. These four characterizations of schools suggest important starting points for scholars and practitioners to integrate schools into existing foci of community development practice.

First, asset-based community development and other community building strategies that emphasize cultivating social capital should pursue ways to tap into existing social networks at local schools (e.g., Kretzmann and McKnight 1996; Putnam et al. 2004; Saegert, Thompson, and Warren 2001). As the response to closures in Philadelphia made clear, even schools that struggled to educate their students remained important social hubs and points of contact for the community, echoing the findings of previous research on the consequences of school closures for local communities (e.g., Bondi 1987; Kearns et al. 2009; Oncescu and Giles 2014; Witten, McCreanor, and Kearns 2007). Multigenerational relationships with local families further enhance the potential schools represent for anchoring community organizing efforts or campaigns to build community buy-in around local concerns. Scholarship should evaluate strategies for engaging neighborhood social networks through local schools, perhaps by coordinating with existing parent organizations or community outreach initiatives already being pursued by the school.

Second, in neighborhoods struggling with long trajectories of disinvestment, churches and other community-based organizations can be valuable to community development efforts for the organizational capacity they represent (Choi 2010; Small 2006). While neighborhood schools do not offer the fiscal infrastructure of independent 501c3 organizations that are able to assist in fundraising or grant writing, they can still potentially support local initiatives through other dimensions of organizational capacity, including reputation in the community, legitimacy as a convener, role as an information broker, options for neutral meeting space, and political connections outside the community. Descriptive research is needed to better understand the ways schools currently function most effectively as neighborhood organizations. How can nascent community development initiatives partner with poorly resourced local schools in ways that are mutually beneficial, leveraging the school’s organizational capacity on behalf of community concerns while at the same time bringing greater community support and resources into the school?

Third, poorly performing schools arguably represent more of a detriment to local economic development than a benefit (see, for example, Black and Machin 2011). And yet, the responses of a breadth of neighborhood stakeholders in this study—from community leaders to a major university—made clear a connection between an open school and neighborhood economic potential. As sources of foot traffic and bellwethers of real estate valuation, schools are inextricably linked to neighborhood economics, and efforts to promote community economic development should have the conditions at local schools squarely on their radar. The challenge for community development practitioners is to find ways to support local schools without catalyzing development that displaces long-term residents in poorer neighborhoods (Posey-Maddox, Kimelberg, and Cucchiara 2014). Future scholarship should pursue case examples that have managed this balance.

Fourth, as a dominant physical presence and sizeable piece of real estate in many neighborhoods, school buildings and decisions about their potential vacancy and reuse have significant and potentially long-term consequences for the day-to-day experience of those living nearby (Vincent 2014; Vincent and Filardo 2008). Community development organizations should be actively engaging with these decision-making processes. More research is needed on school facility inequities, vacancy management, and best practices for school building reuse (Bierbaum 2018b).

In addition, and more broadly, future research should engage strategies for cooperation and communication across community, municipal, and school district entities. The historical separation between school reform and community development efforts reflects, in part, the independence of school districts from local political and planning bodies (Vincent 2006; Warren 2005). A consequence of this bureaucratic separation is that while school district facility decisions have broad implications for neighborhoods, the local effects of those decisions fall outside the school district’s responsibility. One area of recent programmatic innovation that may prove instructive for efforts to bridge this separation is the “community schools” model. Some jurisdictions—and Philadelphia is one of them—have begun experimenting with community schools as an integrated strategy that brings together community, municipal, and school district resources and priorities to improve student learning. Community schools develop partnerships with local health and social service providers to meet a breadth of family needs within the school building (Blank, Berg, and Melaville 2006). The model leverages the roles that schools already play as centers of community connection and spaces through which families pass each week, to more effectively address the out-of-school challenges that prevent children from learning (Dryfoos 2005; T. L. Green and Gooden 2014). Future research should build on the learnings of community schools to pursue new ways that school districts, municipal governments, and planning departments can better work together to coordinate community development and school improvement priorities.

The relevance of schools for community development concerns has parallels in the relationships between neighborhoods and other local institutions, including churches, libraries, and hospitals. Schools are arguably unique in the scope and type of involvement they have with children and neighborhood families. However, there are important equivalences to recognize in the ways all of these institutions provide services to local residents, are housed in large physical buildings, function as nodes of community connection, and can carry important dimensions of community and place identity. For example, scholars have explored the roles churches play in developing social capital, leveraging external resources into neighborhoods, and supporting local economic development (e.g., Choi 2010; Kinney and Winter 2006; McRoberts 2003). Research within library science has engaged community use of libraries as meeting spaces and the ways libraries build community through engagement with otherness (Aabø and Audunson 2012) and developing social capital (Ferguson 2012). And, within geography, a literature on hospital closures arising from neoliberal restructuring has illuminated the importance of hospitals—particularly in rural communities—for grounding community and place identities (James 1999; Kearns and Joseph 1997; Wiersma and Koster 2014). Although schools represent a unique set of issues, there are important parallels with the possibilities these other types of organizations represent for supporting community development. In an era when privatization and state retrenchment are transforming the governance of social institutions across many sectors, it is important that these parallels and their implications for communities be studied.

Ultimately, bringing community development practice into closer collaboration with local schools entails engaging traditional public schools and school buildings for what they represent as a system of neighborhood-based public infrastructure (Vincent 2006). As such, this network of organizations and physical properties constitutes significant potential for publicly coordinated place-based community development. When a school limps along with 40 percent of its enrollment capacity and crippling maintenance backlogs, this potential lies unrealized. Fundamentally, however, the issue that deserves greater attention within planning and community development scholarship concerns interrogating the implications of dismantling and liquidating this public asset. The potential these public properties represent is cut short when public schools are closed and the properties are sold.

Underfunded and underperforming schools represent an enduring limitation for many poor neighborhoods, perpetuating legacies of racialized segregation, disinvestment, and lack of opportunity (Squires and Kubrin 2005). Neighborhood schools, however, are also pieces of an infrastructure of public buildings, institutions, and services that are located in and serve local communities. In neighborhoods that have suffered extended periods of disinvestment, schools can be among the few remaining institutions and represent for communities both a resource and a source of possibility—the remnants of an infrastructure whose footprint still carries the potential to anchor a community’s growth and development (Noguera 1996; Silverman 2014a). The dismantling of public school infrastructure, amid calls to further marketize publicly funded education in the United States, has direct implications for planning and community development efforts. It is critical that planning scholarship begin to trace these connections.

Conclusion

In the Philadelphia school closure debate, neighborhood stakeholders revealed key alignments between community development efforts and the roles schools play in local communities by describing schools as social hubs and sources of social support, as neighborhood organizations, as supporters of local business and anchors of economic development, and as vacant buildings. These alignments suggest helpful entry points for community development scholars and practitioners to begin more actively engaging with local schools. Specifically, (1) efforts to cultivate local social capital should explore ways to tap into existing networks at local schools; (2) schools represent organizational capacity that can be leveraged for community development initiatives in neighborhoods with few community-based organizations; (3) schools have the capacity to anchor community economic development, although the risk of catalyzing gentrification must be acknowledged; and (4) schools occupy significant physical space within neighborhoods, and community development practitioners should proactively engage discussions about the use and reuse of school facilities to ensure their future uses best serve community needs.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to James DeFilippis, Bob Lake, Angela Oberg, Julia Flagg, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback that greatly improved this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Ryan M. Good is an assistant professor of applied social sciences and assistant director of the Washington Community Scholars’ Center at Eastern Mennonite University. His research focuses on community development, public schools, and the politics of place.

References

Aabø

Svanhild

Audunson

Ragnar

. 2012. “Use of Library Space and the Library as Place.” Library & Information Science Research 34 (2): 138–49. doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2011.06.002.

Anguelovski

Isabelle

. 2013. “New Directions in Urban Environmental Justice: Rebuilding Community, Addressing Trauma, and Remaking Place.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 33 (2): 160–75. doi:10.1177/0739456X13478019.

Anyon

Jean

. 2014. Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and a New Social Movement. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

Basu

Ranu

. 2007. “Negotiating Acts of Citizenship in an Era of Neoliberal Reform: The Game of School Closures.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31 (1): 109–27. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2007.00709.x.

Baum

Howell S.

1999. “Community Organizations Recruiting Community Participation: Predicaments in Planning.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 18 (3): 187–99. doi:10.1177/0739456X9901800301.

Baum

Howell S.

2000. “Fantasies and Realities in University-Community Partnerships.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 20 (2): 234–46. doi:10.1177/0739456X0002000208.

Baum

Howell S.

2003. Community Action for School Reform. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Baum

Howell S.

2004. “Smart Growth and School Reform: What If We Talked about Race and Took Community Seriously?” Journal of the American Planning Association 70 (1): 14–26. doi:10.1080/01944360408976335.

Bendick

Marc

Egan

Mary Lou

. 1993. “Linking Business Development and Community Development in Inner Cities.” Journal of Planning Literature 8 (1): 3–19. doi:10.1177/088541229300800101.

10.

Bierbaum

Ariel H.

2018a. “News Media’s Democratic Functions in Public Education: An Analysis of Newspaper Framings of Public School Closures.” Urban Education. Published electronically March 13. doi:10.1177/0042085918756713.

11.

Bierbaum

Ariel H.

2018b. “School Closures and the Contested Unmaking of Philadelphia’s Neighborhoods.” Journal of Planning Education and Research. Published electronically June 29. doi:10.1177/0739456X18785018.

12.

Black

Sandra E.

Machin

Stephen

. 2011. “Housing Valuations of School Performance.” In Handbook of the Economics of Education, edited by Hanushek

Eric A.

Machin

Stephen

Woessmann

Ludger

, Vol. 3, 485–519. New York: North Holland.

13.

Blank

Martin J.

Berg

Amy C.

Melaville

Atelia

. 2006. “Growing Community Schools: The Role of Cross-Boundary Leadership.” Washington, DC: Coalition for Community Schools. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED491689.pdf.

14.

Bondi

Liz

. 1987. “School Closures and Local Politics: The Negotiation of Primary School Rationalization in Manchester.” Political Geography Quarterly 6 (3): 203–24. doi:10.1016/S0260-9827(87)80001-0.

15.

Boothroyd

Peter

Davis

H. Craig

. 1993. “Community Economic Development: Three Approaches.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 12 (3): 230–40. doi:10.1177/0739456X9301200307.

16.

Brinig

Margaret E.

Garnett

Nicole Stelle

. 2010. “Catholic Schools, Urban Neighborhoods, and Education Reform.” Notre Dame Law Review 85 (3): 887–954. doi:10.2139/ssrn.1395676.

17.

Brummet

Quentin

. 2014. “The Effect of School Closings on Student Achievement.” Journal of Public Economics 119 (November 2014): 108–24. doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2014.06.010.

18.

Buras

Kristen L.

2013. “‘We’re Not Going Nowhere’: Race, Urban Space, and the Struggle for King Elementary School in New Orleans.” Critical Studies in Education 54 (1): 19–32. doi:10.1080/17508487.2013.741072.

19.

Burdick-Will

Julia

Keels

Micere

Schuble

Todd

. 2013. “Closing and Opening Schools: The Association between Neighborhood Characteristics and the Location of New Educational Opportunities in a Large Urban District.” Journal of Urban Affairs 35 (1): 59–80. doi:10.1111/juaf.12004.

20.

Choi

Hyunsun

. 2010. “Religious Institutions and Ethnic Entrepreneurship: The Korean Ethnic Church as a Small Business Incubator.” Economic Development Quarterly 24 (4): 372–83. doi:10.1177/0891242410375426.

21.

Chung

Connie

. 2002. “Using Public Schools as Community Development Tools: Strategies for Community-Based Developers.” Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED479731.

22.

Deeds

Vontrese

Pattillo

Mary

. 2015. “Organizational ‘Failure’ and Institutional Pluralism: A Case Study of an Urban School Closure.” Urban Education 50 (4): 474–504. doi:10.1177/0042085913519337.

23.

James

DeFilippis

Saegert

Susan

, eds. 2012. The Community Development Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

24.

Dryfoos

Joy

. 2005. “Full-Service Community Schools: A Strategy—Not a Program.” New Directions for Youth Development 2005 (107):7–14.

25.

Ferguson

Stuart

. 2012. “Are Public Libraries Developers of Social Capital? A Review of Their Contribution and Attempts to Demonstrate It.” The Australian Library Journal 61 (1): 22–33. doi:10.1080/00049670.2012.10722299.

26.

Ferman

Barbara

Kaylor

Patrick

. 2001. “Building the Spatial Community: A Case Study of Neighborhood Institutions.” Review of Policy Research 18 (4): 53–70. doi:10.1111/j.1541-1338.2001.tb00206.x.

27.

Fischel

William A.

2006. “Why Voters Veto Vouchers: Public Schools and Community-Specific Social Capital.” Economics of Governance 7 (2): 109–32. doi:10.1007/s10101-005-0005-5.

28.

Ganapati

Sukumar

. 2008. “Critical Appraisal of Three Ideas for Community Development in the United States.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 27 (4): 382–99. doi:10.1177/0739456X07313428.

29.

Gill

Brian

Zimmer

Ron

Christman

Jolley Bruce

Blanc

Suzanne

. 2007. “State Takeover, School Restructuring, Private Management, and Student Achievement in Philadelphia.” Arlington, VA: RAND Corporation. http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG533.html.

30.

Good

Ryan M.

2017a. “Histories That Root Us: Neighborhood, Place, and the Protest of School Closures in Philadelphia.” Urban Geography 38 (6): 861–83. doi:10.1080/02723638.2016.1182286.

31.

Good

Ryan M.

2017b. “Invoking Landscapes of Spatialized Inequality: Race, Class, and Place in Philadelphia’s School Closure Debate.” Journal of Urban Affairs 39 (3): 358–80. doi:10.1080/07352166.2016.1245069.

32.

Graham

Kristen A.

2012a. “Downsizing Drama—Closings, Changes May Affect 17,000 Students, 2,000 Staff. Few Teaching Jobs Seen as Affected.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, CITY-D edition, sec. Local, A01, December 14.

33.

Graham

Kristen A.

2012b. “Schools Budget Includes Overhaul—The Nearly Insolvent District’s Central Office Would Be Replaced, Schools Would Close, Jobs Would Be Lost.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, CITY-C edition, sec. Local, A01, April 25.

34.

Graham

Kristen A.

2012c. “Unions, Parents to Protest SRC Plan—The $2.5 Billion Budget Shortchanges Students, They Say, and SRC Should Fight for More Funding.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, CITY-C edition, sec. Local, A01, May 31.

35.

Graham

Kristen A.

2013. “Taking Aim at School Closings—Activists Step up Fight against Philadelphia Plan. Education Dept. Vows Civil Rights Probe.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, CITY-D edition, sec. Local, A01, January 28.

36.

Green

Gary Paul

Haines

Anna

. 2016. Asset Building and Community Development. 4th ed. Washington, DC: SAGE.

37.

Green

Terrance L.

Gooden

Mark A

. 2014. “Transforming Out-of-School Challenges into Opportunities: Community Schools Reform in the Urban Midwest.” Urban Education 49 (8): 930–54.

38.

Harwood

Stacy Anne

. 2003. “Environmental Justice on the Streets: Advocacy Planning as a Tool to Contest Environmental Racism.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 23 (1): 24–38. doi:10.1177/0739456X03255431.

39.

Herold

Benjamin

. 2012. “Philadelphia School District Wants to Close 37 Schools, Relocate or Reconfigure Dozens More.” NewsWorks, December 13. https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-school-district-wants-to-close-37-schools-relocate-or-reconfigure-dozens-more/.

40.

Hum

Tarry

. 2010. “Planning in Neighborhoods with Multiple Publics: Opportunities and Challenges for Community-Based Nonprofit Organizations.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 29 (4): 461–77. doi:10.1177/0739456X10368700.

41.

Immergluck

Dan

. 2012. “Distressed and Dumped: Market Dynamics of Low-Value, Foreclosed Properties during the Advent of the Federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 32 (1): 48–61. doi:10.1177/0739456X11423263.

42.

Irwin

Bill

Seasons

Marlk

. 2012. “School Closure Decision-Making Processes: Problems and Prospects.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 21 (2): 45–67. https://www-jstor-org.web.bisu.edu.cn/stable/26193912.

43.

James

Amanda M.

1999. “Closing Rural Hospitals in Saskatchewan: On the Road to Wellness?” Social Science & Medicine 49 (8): 1021–34. doi:10.1016/S0277-9536(99)00180-X.

44.

Johnson

Amanda Walker

. 2013. “‘Turnaround’ as Shock Therapy: Race, Neoliberalism, and School Reform.” Urban Education 48 (2): 232–56. doi:10.1177/0042085912441941.

45.

Kearns

Robin A.

Joseph

Alun E

. 1997. “Restructuring Health and Rural Communities in New Zealand.” Progress in Human Geography 21 (1): 18–32. doi:10.1191/030913297666611118.

46.

Kearns

Robin A.

Lewis

Nicolas

McCreanor

Tim

Witten

Karen

. 2009. “‘The Status Quo Is Not an Option’: Community Impacts of School Closure in South Taranaki, New Zealand.” Journal of Rural Studies 25 (1): 131–40. doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.08.002.

47.

Kinney

Nancy T.

Winter

William E

. 2006. “Places of Worship and Neighborhood Stability.” Journal of Urban Affairs 28 (4): 335–52. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9906.2006.00299.x.

48.

Kirshner

Ben

Pozzoboni

Kristen M

. 2011. “Student Interpretations of a School Closure: Implications for Student Voice in Equity-Based School Reform.” Teachers College Record 113 (8): 1633–67. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ988296.

49.

Kretchmar

Kerry

. 2014. “Democracy (in)Action: A Critical Policy Analysis of New York City Public School Closings by Teachers, Students, Administrators, and Community Members.” Education and Urban Society 46 (1): 3–29. doi:10.1177/0013124511424108.

50.

Kretzmann

John P.

1992. “Community-Based Development and Local Schools: A Promising Partnership.” WP-92-14. Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University. https://www.nurturedevelopment.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Community-Based-Development-And-Local-Schools-A-Promising-Partnership.pdf.

51.

Kretzmann

John P.

McKnight

John P

. 1996. “Assets-Based Community Development.” National Civic Review 85 (4): 23–29. doi:10.1002/ncr.4100850405.

52.

Lipman

Pauline

. 2011a. “Contesting the City: Neoliberal Urbanism and the Cultural Politics of Education Reform in Chicago.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 32 (2): 217–34. doi:10.1080/01596306.2011.562667.

53.

Lipman

Pauline

. 2011b. The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City. New York: Routledge.

54.

Logan

John R.

Burdick-Will

Julia

. 2015. “School Segregation, Charter Schools, and Access to Quality Education.” Journal of Urban Affairs 38 (3): 323–43. doi:10.1111/juaf.12246.

55.

Logan

John R.

Rabrenovic

Gordana

. 1990. “Neighborhood Associations: Their Issues, Their Allies, and Their Opponents.” Urban Affairs Review 26 (1): 68–94. doi:10.1177/004208169002600104.

56.

Marwell

Nicole P.

2007. Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

57.

McRoberts

Omar M.

2003. Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

58.

Mezzacappa

Dale

. 2012a. “Enon Meeting Draws Upwards of 2,000 People.” Public School Notebook. May 9. https://thenotebook.org/articles/2012/05/09/enon-meeting-draws-upwards-of-2-000-people/.

59.

Mezzacappa

Dale

. 2012b. “Radical District Reorganization, 64 School Closings Planned.” Public School Notebook. April 24. http://thenotebook.org/blog/124746/radical-district-reorganization-64-school-closings-planned.

60.

Naimark

Susan

. 2015. “Engaging the Public Schools: Are You Ready?” Rooflines: The Shelterforce Blog, October 29. http://www.rooflines.org/4295/engaging_the_public_schools_are_you_ready/.

61.

Newman

Kathe

Lake

Robert W

. 2006. “Democracy, Bureaucracy and Difference in US Community Development Politics since 1968.” Progress in Human Geography 30 (1): 44–61. doi:10.1191/0309132506ph590oa.

62.

Noguera

Pedro A.

1996. “Confronting the Urban in Urban School Reform.” The Urban Review 28 (1): 1–19. doi:10.1007/BF02354375.

63.

Nuamah

Sally A.

2017. “The Paradox of Educational Attitudes: Racial Differences in Public Opinion on School Closure.” Journal of Urban Affairs. Published electronically October 30. doi:10.1080/07352166.2017.1360734.

64.

Oncescu

Jaquelyn

Giles

Audrey

. 2014. “Rebuilding a Sense of Community through Reconnection: The Impact of a Rural School’s Closure on Individuals without School-Aged Children.” Journal of Rural and Community Development 9 (3): 296–319.

65.

Pappas

Liza N.

2012. “School Closings and Parent Engagement.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 18 (2): 165–72. doi:10.1037/a0028100.

66.

Pennsylvania Department of Education. 2002–2013a. “Charter School Annual Reports and Enrollment Data” [Data file]. https://www.education.pa.gov/Data-and-Statistics/Pages/Enrollment%20Reports%20and%20Projections.aspx

67.

Pennsylvania Department of Education. 2002–2013b. “Public School Enrollment Reports” [Data file]. https://www.education.pa.gov/Data-and-Statistics/Pages/Enrollment%20Reports%20and%20Projections.aspx

68.

Posey-Maddox

Linn

Kimelberg

Shelley McDonough

Cucchiara

Maia

. 2014. “Middle-Class Parents and Urban Public Schools: Current Research and Future Directions.” Sociology Compass 8 (4): 446–56. doi:10.1111/soc4.12148.

69.

Putnam

Robert D.

Light

Ivan

Briggs

Xavier de Souza

Rohe

William M.

Vidal

Avis C.

Hutchinson

Judy

Gress

Jennifer

Woolcock

Michael

. 2004. “Using Social Capital to Help Integrate Planning Theory, Research, and Practice.” Journal of the American Planning Association 70 (2): 142–92. doi:10.1080/01944360408976369.

70.

Raleigh

Erica

Galster

George

. 2015. “Neighborhood Disinvestment, Abandonment, and Crime Dynamics.” Journal of Urban Affairs 37 (4): 367–96. doi:10.1111/juaf.12102.

71.

Saegert

Susan

Thompson

J. Phillip

Warren

Mark R.

, eds. 2001. Social Capital and Poor Communities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

72.

Sampson

Robert J.

2012. “What Community Supplies.” In The Community Development Reader, edited by DeFilippis

James

Saegert

Susan

, 2nd ed., 308–18. New York: Routledge.

73.

Schilling

Joseph

Logan

Jonathan

. 2008. “Greening the Rust Belt: A Green Infrastructure Model for Right Sizing America’s Shrinking Cities.” Journal of the American Planning Association 74 (4): 451–66. doi:10.1080/01944360802354956.

74.

School District of Philadelphia. 2012. “A Blueprint for Transforming Philadelphia’s Public Schools.”

75.

Silverman

Robert Mark

. 2014a. “Anchoring Community Development to Schools and Neighborhoods: A Renewed Tradition of Putting People First.” In Schools and Urban Revitalization: Rethinking Institutions and Community Development, edited by Patterson

Kelly L.

Silverman

Robert Mark

, 14–27. New York: Routledge.

76.

Silverman

Robert Mark

. 2014b. “Urban, Suburban, and Rural Contexts of School Districts and Neighborhood Revitalization Strategies: Rediscovering Equity in Education Policy and Urban Planning.” Leadership and Policy in Schools 13 (1): 3–27. doi:10.1080/15700763.2013.876051.

77.

Sites

William

Chaskin

Robert J.

Parks

Virginia

. 2007. “Reframing Community Practice for the 21st Century: Multiple Traditions, Multiple Challenges.” Journal of Urban Affairs 29 (5): 519–41. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9906.2007.00363.x.

78.

Small

Mario L.

2006. “Neighborhood Institutions as Resource Brokers: Childcare Centers, Interorganizational Ties, and Resource Access among the Poor.” Social Problems 53 (2): 274–92. doi:10.1525/sp.2006.53.2.274.

79.

Socolar

Paul

. 2013. “Proposed Closings Hit Black Students Most.” Philadelphia Public School Notebook, January 10. https://thenotebook.org/articles/2013/01/10/proposed-closings-hit-black-students-most/.

80.

Squires

Gregory D.

Kubrin

Charis E

. 2005. “Privileged Places: Race, Uneven Development and the Geography of Opportunity in Urban America.” Urban Studies 42 (1): 47–68. doi:10.1080/0042098042000309694.

81.

Taylor

Henry Louis

Jr.

2005. “Connecting Community Development and Urban School Reform.” In Urban Education with an Attitude, edited by Johnson

Lauri

Finn

Mary E.

Lewis

Rebecca

, 41–57. Albany: State University of New York Press.

82.

Vincent

Jeffrey M.

2006. “Public Schools as Public Infrastructure: Roles for Planning Researchers.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 25 (4): 433–37. doi:10.1177/0739456X06288092.

83.

Vincent

Jeffrey M.

2014. “Joint Use of Public Schools: A Framework for Promoting Healthy Communities.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 34 (2): 153–68. doi:10.1177/0739456X13513615.

84.

Vincent

Jeffrey M.

Filardo

Mary W

. 2008. “Linking School Construction Investments to Equity, Smart Growth, and Healthy Communities.” Center for Cities & Schools and Building Educational Success Together. http://citiesandschools.berkeley.edu/reports/Vincent_Filardo_2008_Linking_School_Construction_Jun2008.pdf.

85.

Warren

Mark R.

2005. “Communities and Schools: A New View of Urban Education Reform.” Harvard Educational Review 75 (2): 133–73. doi:10.17763/haer.75.2.m718151032167438.

86.

Weber

Rachel

Farmer

Stephanie

Donoghue.

Mary

2018. “Predicting School Closures in an Era of Austerity: The Case of Chicago.” Urban Affairs Review. Published electronically October 22. doi:10.1177/1078087418802359.

87.

Wiersma

Elaine C.

Koster

Rhonda

. 2014. “‘It’s Not Only for Sick People’: The Place of the Local Hospital in a Rural Northern Ontario Community.” Canadian Geographer/Geographe Canadien 58 (3): 341–54. doi:10.1111/cag.12085.

88.

Wiewel

Wim

Teitz

Michael

Giloth

Robert

. 2012. “The Economic Development of Neighborhoods and Localities.” In The Community Development Reader, edited by DeFilippis

James

Saegert

Susan

, 2nd ed., 107–16. New York: Routledge.

89.

Witten

Karen

Kearns

Robin

Lewis

Nick

Coster

Heather

McCreanor

Tim

. 2003. “Educational Restructuring from a Community Viewpoint: A Case Study of School Closure from Invercargill, New Zealand.” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 21 (2): 203–23. doi:10.1068/c05r.

90.

Witten

Karen

McCreanor

Tim

Kearns

Robin

. 2007. “The Place of Schools in Parents’ Community Belonging.” New Zealand Geographer 63 (2): 141–48. doi:10.1111/j.1745-7939.2007.00097.x.

91.

Witten

Karen

McCreanor

Tim

Kearns

Robin

Ramasubramanian

Laxmi

. 2001. “The Impacts of a School Closure on Neighbourhood Social Cohesion: Narratives from Invercargill, New Zealand.” Health & Place 7 (4): 307–17. doi:10.1016/S1353-8292(01)00023-5.

92.

Wolf-Powers

Laura

. 2014. “Understanding Community Development in a ‘Theory of Action’ Framework: Norms, Markets, Justice.” Planning Theory & Practice 15 (2): 202–19. doi:10.1080/14649357.2014.905621.

93.

Yin

Robert K.

1994. Case Study Research: Design and Methods. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.