ABSTRACT
Urban school closures as school reform policy demonstrate philosophical quandaries about the purposes of schooling. School closures as a tool of school reform have a sordid history in the United States, especially as that history pertains to issues of race, class, citizenship, socioeconomic status, and political empowerment. The “urban” label is often inappropriately and pejoratively related to race and class, but these connotations shift as the dispossession of Black and Brown people concentrated in urban centers coincides with gentrification and the replacement of those very same Black and Brown people. Urban schools are especially vulnerable given their conditions and their extreme needs, but often, these vulnerabilities and extreme needs have been ignored and instead labeled “failing”. Low faith in under-resourced communities and the schools within them led to continued disinvestment in public schooling, while simultaneously calls are made for extensive reforms.
