Democracy, Justice, and School Closures

Over the past few decades, school closure has emerged as a key strategy for education reform. Districts across the country have moved to close schools deemed to be chronically underperforming by official metrics as way to promote academic achievement. More recently, a sizeable body of literature has emerged raising significant questions about the wisdom of school closures, with some scholars and activists criticizing school closures as an injustice. In this article, Ellis Reid takes seriously the claim that the adoption of school closures as a reform strategy is unjust. Drawing on work in democratic theory, Reid argues that the widespread embrace of school closures to "turn around" schools thought to be failing rests in part on racially stigmatizing ideas about schools serving Black and Latinx students and the communities in which these schools are embedded. Importantly, racial stigmatization is not an isolated problem but rather points toward a broader crisis in American democracy. Ultimately, Reid argues that responding to this crisis demands that we take seriously the arguments advanced by the critics of school closures and adopt a broader view of the value of a school.