How Closing Schools Traumatizes Students and Communities
Since 2004, Oakland Unified School District has closed 16 schools and is now targeting an additional 24 by the start of the 2019-20 school year. District officials call it “right-sizing,” a term borrowed from corporate America – appropriate given that many of the shuttered schools will be converted into for-profit charters. While policymakers see failing or “bad” schools, parents, students and educators see pillars of the community that have not been adequately funded and are worth fighting for.
Closing down his school, one Oakland seventh grader testified in January, “is like putting me up for adoption ..[My school] made me who I am.”
These are scenes that have been playing out in urban school districts across the country. In 2013, Chicago announced it was closing 50 schools, 90 percent of which served all-black student populations. The plan triggered massive protests from parents, educators, students and community members. The mobilization to save their neighborhood schools is recounted in “Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side,” by Eve L. Ewing.
In the book, Ewing, who in addition to being an assistant professor at the University of Chicago is also a poet and podcaster, vividly describes the anger, destabilization and sense of displacement felt by the families impacted most by school closings.
These are the voices that need to be heard as policymakers make decisions that put children’s lives on the line, Ewing says. And, as she recently told NEA Today, no amount of bureaucratic jargon and cherry-picked data can conceal the racist underpinnings behind the top-down, punitive policies that have dominated the CONTINUE READING: How Closing Schools Traumatizes Students and Communities - NEA Today
Big Education Ape: My Review of Eve L. Ewing’s “Ghosts in the Schoolyard” | Diane Ravitch's blog - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2018/11/my-review-of-eve-l-ewings-ghosts-in.html
Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side: Eve L. Ewing: 9780226526027: Amazon.com: Books - https://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Schoolyard-Racism-Closings-Chicagos/dp/022652602X