Rightsizing Time
Behind the School Closure Epidemic
Will there be a time when the term “school to prison pipeline” becomes “the home to prison pipeline” or the “home to military pipeline” because there are simply no more schools to speak of? If you interpret the public school closure epidemic sweeping U.S. cities as a deliberate attack on primarily poor black, Latino, and immigrant communities, then you already understand more than many politicians, judges, CEOs, and education policy apologists/analysts will concede. It’s surprising not more people are talking about the widespread impact of mass school closure; not a single education item made it onto Project Censored’s annual list of most censored news stories for 2013. School closures did receive mainstream media coverage recently on MSNBC. Melissa Harris-Perry’s webpage recently featured an article by Trymaine Lee that provides stunning statistics regarding school closures in poor/black neighborhoods. In Chicago “88% of the students affected by the school closures are African-American. The numbers are just as glaring in Philadelphia, where 81% are black. In both cities more than 93% of the affected students come from poor families.”
While being a wildly popular solution for both political parties, school closure (“rightsizing”) is a very dangerous plan when you consider the social impact of restructuring. So far, available studies indicate that mass school closure is failing as a quick academic and financial fix. Given the evidence of failure—why the ongoing school closure trend? The authors consider the culture/class wars (which include gender-class based