Chapter 1: The Rise of School Closures in the 21St Century

In recent years, mass school closures have reshaped public education in cities across the United States. Increasingly, urban districts are grappling with declining enrollments and financial deficits, challenges traditionally associated with rural districts (Bard, Gardener, & Wieland, 2006). In response to these challenges, education officials shuttered approximately 24,000 K–12 public schools between 1999 and 2013, displacing on average a quarter of a million students each year (NCES, 2016). Recent reports on school closings in Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities suggest that stringent accountability policies, new achievement benchmarks, urban depopulation, redevelopment, municipal budget deficits, charter school expansion, and a host of other political and contextual factors drive contemporary closure trends (de la Torre & Gwynne, 2009a; Dowdall & Eichel, 2011; Engberg, Gill, Zamarro, & Zimmer, 2012; Fine, 2012; Han, et al., 2017; Hurdle, 2013; Kelleher & Wisniewski, 2013; Lipman, 2013; Sunderman & Payne, 2009).