Invoking landscapes of spatialized inequality: Race, class, and place in Philadelphia’s school closure debate

ABSTRACT

This article considers the intersection of school closure recommendations in Philadelphia in 2013 with neighborhood race and class demographics and explores how neighborhood stakeholders situated themselves in space in protesting school closures. Quantitative analysis reveals that census tracts where schools were slated for closure had disproportionately lower income and higher representation of African American residents than those tracts without closure recommendations. Qualitative analysis of testimony at public meetings and subsequent interviews with neighborhood stakeholders highlights 3 ways in which stakeholders invoked their spatial positionality on this landscape: (1) by framing school closure as confirmation and perpetuation of past place-based inequities and marginalization, (2) by describing school closure as a burden unequally borne by poor and African-American communities, and (3) by portraying school closure as a harbinger of displacement. The article highlights the ways in which stakeholders rooted schools in place in racialized political economic space, countering the aspatial logics of marketized school reforms.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to James DeFilippis for his willingness to read multiple drafts of this article as it was developed and to Bob Lake for a very close reading that came near the end. I also thank Radha Jagannathan for helpful feedback on the logit model.

Notes

1. The state of Pennsylvania took over the SDP in 2002, setting up a five-member School Reform Commission charged with putting the struggling district’s fiscal house in order. This move by Harrisburg outraged many in Philadelphia who saw it as an attempt by a Republican governor and state legislature to push a privatization agenda onto the city’s public school system.

2. Official transcript of February 12, 2013, hearing held by the Philadelphia City Council Committee on Education retrieved from http://legislation.phila.gov/transcripts/Public%20Hearings/education/2013/ed021213.pdf.

3. Video recording of December 19, 2012, community meeting facilitated by the SDP retrieved from: http://webgui.phila.k12.pa.us/offices/f/facilities-master-plan/community-forums.

4. Official transcript of February 12, 2013 hearing held by the Philadelphia City Council Committee on Education retrieved from http://legislation.phila.gov/transcripts/Public%20Hearings/education/2013/ed021213.pdf.

5. The first charter schools opened in Philadelphia in 1997, and at the time of the 2002 state takeover of the SDP, 15,759 Philadelphia students were enrolled in bricks-and-mortar or cyber charter schools, constituting 7% of publicly funded students in the city. By 2012–2013, that number had risen to 52,095 students and represented 27% of all publicly funded students (Pennsylvania Department of Education, 2002–2013a). Though the 2013 restructuring plan was not integrated with a call for charter school expansion per se, it was clearly driven in part by the charter-sector growth of the previous decade and opponents understood it to be a continued step in the direction of greater privatization of public education in the city.

6. For this analysis, I identified 45 buildings or programs as having been recommended for closure in 2013. This count is slightly higher than the numbers cited most often in the press. Determining how many schools were recommended for closure is definitionally complicated, because the District’s proposal included significant restructuring of programs, moving programs from one building to another, and colocating multiple programs in the same building. I included instances where a building was recommended to close, a program was recommended to close, and/or a program was recommended to move to a different location.

7. Demographic data were drawn from the 2012 American Community Survey 5-year estimates (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012), supplemented by data from the US2010 Project, Longitudinal Tract Data Base to describe changes from 2000–2012 (US2010, 2000).

8. This conversion limits the effect of outliers on the model and does not assume linearity in the relationships between the dependent and independent variables. Though categories were constructed based on citywide quantiles, the model included only those tracts that contained a District-run school in 2012–2013. Thus, the number of cases in each category of a given variable is not even (see Table 3 for frequencies).

9. At this point, I added both of the earlier removed variables individually into model 2 to check for suppressor or moderator effects. The coefficients of percentage rental tenure remained insignificant and their addition to the model did not markedly change coefficients on the other covariates. Adding median home value (MHV) to model 2 had little effect on either population change or percentage African American. However, it suppressed the coefficients on MHI and amplified the coefficients on change in MHV, decreasing the significance for both—markedly so for MHI. I opted to leave MHV out of the model because its coefficients remained insignificant and because of the considerable correlation between MHV and change in MHV.

10. The SDP held 13 such public meetings. I reviewed only those meetings held in parts of the city close to the three case neighborhoods framing this project.

11. Community meetings video retrieved from http://webgui.phila.k12.pa.us/offices/f/facilities-master-plan/community-forums. Video records of SRC meetings retrieved from: http://webgui.phila.k12.pa.us/offices/c/communications2/broadcast-operations/. Official transcript of City Council hearing retrieved from: http://legislation.phila.gov/transcripts/Public%20Hearings/education/2013/ed021213.pdf. Official transcripts of SRC hearings retrieved from: http://webgui.phila.k12.pa.us/offices/f/facilities-master-plan/src-hearing-materials.

12. In direct quotation of interview dialogue in this article, “Int” refers to the interviewer (myself) and “Rsp” refers to the respondent/interviewee.

13. For direct quotations of spoken words in this article, an ellipsis in brackets indicates omitted words.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ryan M. Good

Ryan M. Good is a doctoral candidate in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. His research focuses on the politics of place and the leveraging of place and claims to space in the context of broader political debates. More specifically, his current work explores the politics of school closures and their intersection with issues of planning and community development.