Chapter 10: School Closures And The Political Education Of U.S. Teachers

In the years following the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, urban school districts across the United States experimented with new models of market-based school reform with the stated purpose of decreasing educational costs and improving student performance. Operating alternately under mayoral or gubernatorial control, districts in cities such as Chicago, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC engaged in a “portfolio district” model that prioritizes decentralization, school evaluation using standardized test scores, charter school development, and school closures or turnarounds (e.g., Bulkley, Henig,& Levin, 2010). Using the metaphor of the stock portfolio, the portfolio district model recasts district superintendents as CEOs investing and disinvesting in schools based on their performance (Saltman, 2010). The portfolio model gained national significance with the implementation of the federal reform initiative Race to the Top (de la Torre & Gwynne, 2009). Under Race to the Top, states receiving competitive federal grant money must select from four options to reform “priority schools” identified as failing based on standardized test scores: turnarounds, restarts, transformations, or school closures (U.S. Department of Education, 2009). This reform strategy remained popular in the years following the implementation of Race to the Top, especially in grant-recipient states such as Delaware, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania. School districts in cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia have been particularly focused on market-based school “renaissance” models, gaining national media attention for their use of market-based school reforms such as school closures (e.g., Rich & Hurdle, 2013).