School Closures

School closings are an assault on children, families, and communities, a form of displacement that breaks the web of sustaining human connections that coalesce in the school.

– Pauline Lipman (2015). School closings: The nexus of White supremacy, state abandonment, and accumulation by dispossession. In B. Picower & E. Mayorga (Eds.), What’s Race Got to Do with It? How This Current School Reform Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality. New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang.

This page is dedicated to examining school closings as part of the various education reform strategies shaping the state of public schooling in the U.S. This page serve as the website for an upcoming a conference titled State of the Research” on School Closure: A Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference. The conference will be held on June 19th in Philadelphia, PA. We will also be gathering relevant research and media coverage on this website and on Twitter (@CritEduPolicy)

The “State of the Research” on School Closure: A Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference

For CFP or Registration

In recent years, many public school districts across the country have turned to closing schools as a way to manage declining enrollments and decreased public funding, seeking to consolidate resources so as to improve educational outcomes. These closures have inspired a range of empirical research investigating the veracity of school district claims about cost-savings and academic improvements; the short- and long-term impacts on students, families, and school stakeholders; and the relationships to broader patterns of segregation and opportunity.

This convening aims to bring together researchers who are working across this range of inquiry in the mid-Atlantic region.  The goal is to share findings and approaches, articulate commonalities and divergences across place, and set an agenda for ongoing research and engagement with this and other issues of urban and educational equity. 

The Critical Education Policy Studies group at Swarthmore College (@CrtiEduPolicy) is pleased to be collaborating on organizing this event through our website.

The website will provide updates on the conference and serve as a clearing house for research and media content that is related to school closures and education reform.

If you are interested in learning more, or participating in the online conversations on the topic, please become a subscriber to our website or follow us on Twitter at @CritEduPolicy and at the hashtag #schoolclosures.