ABSTRACT
One major color-evasive assumption of school closure policies is that once a school is closed its students will be able to move onto higher quality schooling options. Yet, school closure does quite the opposite, as research suggests that when a school is closed it disrupts its local community, depleting it of resources, especially young people’s social capital or valuable ties to their local community. Opponents of school closure argue that this reform strategy is actually part of a larger scheme to gentrify low-income Black and Latinx neighborhoods and subsequently monopolize the market with school privatization. Students, families, and community members of color are often left out of the decision-making process when their neighborhood school is slated to be closed. Therefore, in this chapter we provide examples of ways in which local school parents and community activists across the country are organizing to keep their schools open, and how district and school administrators can learn from communities of color’s efforts to redress racial inequities in their neighborhood schools.
