In the aftermath of the pandemic, anxious conversations about school closures have been a near constant as districts around the country grapple with lower enrollment and funding. In Oakland Unified, which has lost 20,000 students in the last 25 years, closures are a fraught topic that often bring a community backlash in the form of protests, walkouts, and meeting disruptions. 

Over the last five years, OUSD has attempted closing schools as a way to stabilize the district budget. It’s a numbers game, they say — with fewer students, it can be a drain on the budget to keep open multiple underenrolled schools as opposed to closing and consolidating them. With fewer buildings, the district’s resources can go further, their argument goes. Community members often posit that closing a school will cause more harm for the affected students and neighborhood, especially when it seems like closures disproportionately burden low-income communities of color.  

Francis A. Pearman, an assistant professor of education at Stanford University, has studied the impacts of school closures and the presumption that closing schools will lead to financial improvements for the district and better outcomes for students. His research explores how school closures accelerate gentrification in communities with higher Black populations, whether closures lead to higher achievement for Black and brown students, and why it seems as if Black schools are the ones most often targeted for closure.

Pearman spoke to The Oaklandside about his work, what happens to a neighborhood after a school shutters, and the other ramifications that school leaders should consider when deliberating over school closures. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Can you tell me about your research interests and your academic background?

I’m broadly interested in issues of educational inequalities — about how inequities within schools arise, and the downstream consequences of those educational inequalities for broader issues of social inequality. I’m particularly interested in the mechanisms and the policies that we have at our discretion or disposal that can increase the life chances of children, in particular, who are growing up in poverty and disinvested communities. 

Broadly speaking, I’m really interested in issues of urban change. One of the big ideas that I spend a lot of time thinking about and theorizing about is the geography of opportunity, which is a term that was coined many years ago. But what I find most interesting about that idea is that the boundaries of the geography of opportunity are not constant, right? They shift. I’m really interested in what happens when the contours of the geography of opportunity fracture and when they evolve. And what are the implications of those evolutions for how we think about schools and the roles that they serve our communities? 

I’m a big data scientist. I think a lot about how good data can be used to access longstanding problems of educational significance. I’m broadly interested, as I mentioned, in matters of inequality and equity. I think a lot about issues of race. I’m really interested in applying the tools of advanced discipline methods to answer questions of broad relevance for folks who care about issues of racial equity. There have been a lot of folks who do that work, and have done that work for a long time, and my contribution is thinking about it from the perspective of new data, massive amounts of data, and doing my best to shore up more what we might think of as solid parameters for the debate. 

Have you done much research around Oakland specifically?

Not much specifically to Oakland. A lot of the work that I do is what’s called “population level.” So I do a lot of work at the national scope. That doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in particular districts, but a lot of my work over the last six or seven years has been about framing up conversations of closures, of gentrification, and of school discipline from a national perspective. Part of that is there are so many conversations that happen about closures, and we don’t have generalized understandings about some of the basic claims being made. In my view, in order to really begin to allow those conversations to become fruitful, and for those conversations to be as robust and information laden as they can be, what’s needed is broad evidence. From that broad evidence, we can begin to explore how particular cases in particular districts might differ. 

A lot of my work over the last several years has really been national in nature. There are other cities like Oakland, right? What we’re talking about is cities with unique racial political histories that have experienced the aftermath of deindustrialization, where they’ve experienced significant out-migration of its Black population. There are other cities that have experienced similar kinds of dynamics — Chicago is a similar one, Philadelphia. So there are some lessons that can be learned in some of these other spaces. But with that said, Oakland is also unique in its proximity to this hub of global commerce that is San Francisco. That’s another peculiarity about the city, its politics, and opportunity structures that present themselves. 

So, to answer your question, no, specifically, but in general, a lot of the issues that I talk about and think about and study have direct connection to what’s happening here.

What prompted you to look at the link between school closures and gentrification?

I think a couple things. A lot of what drives which projects I pursue at any given moment is based on what I would call important conversations that are happening around education policymaking, where there’s actually not good evidence, but there’s a lot of presumptions and hypotheses and anecdotal evidence that’s being marshaled. The first big wave of school closures research was largely about student-level impacts. Like, if you close schools, what happens to students? Are they better off academically or worse off academically? What kinds of schools do they go to? Those are important conversations. 

But what I found interesting — I’m the kind of academic who listens to school board meetings in my free time — what you hear time and time again are concerns amongst community members of what this school closure might do to my neighborhood, what this might do to our community.  And that’s an interesting concern, right? Moreover, as a researcher, it’s an empirical question. You can actually find out what happens to communities when their schools close. Are those communities better off? What are the tradeoffs that a community, a school board, a superintendent should be mindful of in terms of its community-level impact? Prior to that work, there’s virtually zero evidence about when you close schools, what happens to families? 

I’m also somebody who thinks a lot, as I mentioned, about issues of race and racial inequality. I’ve got other work that’s shown the degree to which school closures disproportionately impact Black and brown schools, right? We know that families and communities are many times concerned about the potential implications of closures for the communities. We also know that the folks who are most likely to experience closures are Black and brown communities, disinvested Black and brown communities. And we also know that disinvested Black and brown communities are oftentimes the communities most ripe for the kinds of gentrification, the kinds of “back to the city” movement patterns that force out longterm residents and welcome in a new class and a new group of stakeholders. All of that gives birth to a question of, well, are closures, in fact, related to patterns of gentrification? 

I’m also a gentrification scholar, so I do a lot of work in understanding the causes and consequences of gentrification for matters of education broadly. So the leap to gentrification for me was very easy. And in fact, the two are related, but only in Black communities. That’s the part that folks miss or don’t realize. That’s the lead of that story: School closures are intricately tied to patterns of gentrification, but only when closures happen in Black communities. And that’s an important nuance. The reason why has broad social policy implications. It also is a reminder of the ways in which race still impacts perceptions of school quality. And what I mean by that is, one way to make sense of that pattern is a school closure in a low-income Black community facilitates gentrification, but a school closure in a low-income community that has very few Black residents doesn’t facilitate gentrification. 

Gentrification happens for a number of reasons. One way to think about patterns of gentrification is through the prism of amenities and disamenities. So communities that have a lot of amenities generally are more likely to experience reinvestment when the opportunity rises. Communities that have disamenities, those are things that make living in a community less desirable, are less likely to gentrify. How does all this relate to schools and school closures? Well, you could think about schools as serving, typically, as a kind of amenity right now. When you close an amenity that actually makes the neighborhood less likely to experience gentrification. Because an amenity is something good. You get rid of something good, the community sort of loses something and loses some degree of desirability. In contrast, if a disamenity is removed — that is, if something perceived by a gentrifying class to be negative is removed from the community, that actually increases the desirability of a neighborhood. So what that is getting at is schools are not, in general, either amenities or disamenities in the imagination of what we might think of as middle class, upper middle class, gentrifying class. Schools in general are not disamenities or amenities. In fact, it falls along a racial spectrum. So low-income Black schools are generally perceived as disamenities; you lower the concentration of Black students in those schools, and [the schools] increasingly become an amenity. So when you close the school, its implications for matters of gentrification have everything to do with perceptions of that school, perceptions of quality in that school, and wound up in issues of race. The high-level finding is that, yes, school closures are, in fact, tightly coupled with patterns of gentrification, but only in Black communities.

Can you explain what gentrification is and how you measure it?

Gentrification, in broad strokes, is simply a pattern of reinvestment in communities that have historically experienced disinvestment, and the consequent implications for the demographic makeup of that community, which is oftentimes associated with the displacement of longtime residents. Right now, the gentrification literature is sort of agnostic as to whether it necessarily has to incorporate a racial turnover. People differ on that. In a lot of my work, I don’t bound the two up, in part because I’m also interested in issues of gentrification even of the Black middle class. 

Now, empirically, how do we measure it? First of all, from the scope and scale that I’m trying to do these kinds of analyses, which is across the country, we define neighborhoods in a very specific way. That’s different census tracts, which is generally in alignment with the natural breakup of cities by neighborhoods. It’s not perfect, but it’s communities where there’s anywhere between, 2,000 and 8,000 people. Before you talk about gentrification, you’ve got to define neighborhoods eligible for gentrification. So these are neighborhoods that have a median income below the city average and a share of recently constructed housing that’s also in the lower end of the distribution. So it’s essentially old housing, low median incomes relative to what the city has overall. 

Neighborhoods that are subsequently gentrified are those that meet those criteria, but then in the intervening years — I think between 2000 and 2012 — experience an increase in median income and an increase in the concentration of college-educated households into the neighborhood that exceeds the change in college-education households in the city overall. So these are low-income neighborhoods, disinvested neighborhoods, that during some timeframe experience an increase in the average education levels as well as increases in average salaries or median salaries over time. There’s different kinds of downstream consequences, where you can see out-migration, displacement of long-term residents, but that’s specifically how I define it. 

And when you’re measuring Black communities, how do you identify those?

There’s two papers that I want to reference and answer your question. So in this paper in particular, all we’re doing is looking at what’s called an interaction between whether or not a neighborhood experiences a closure and a measure of the concentration of Black folks in the neighborhood. So it’s not like a majority, it’s not a threshold. It’s just, what is the relationship between a neighborhood experiencing a closure and the likelihood that that neighborhood subsequently experiences gentrification. And we’re looking at how that changes as you incrementally increase the concentration of Black residents in the neighborhood. So the way you model that is just a simple interaction term, and the way you interpret it is, how does the relationship between closure and the likelihood of gentrification change if the share of Black residents in the neighborhood increases by 10 percentage points? 

In the work that I referenced previously about the relationship between racial disparities and closure rates, what we find is that majority-Black schools are far more likely to close than non-majority-Black schools, and that those elevated closure rates can’t be accounted for by conventional explanations for closure, like enrollment changes or achievement. In that paper, we define majority Black in a more conventional way, and in the primary analysis that is whether or not the school is 50% Black or lower, but we also look at whether or not, in an alternative definition of majority Black, whether or not Black students are the largest racial group in the school. They can be the largest racial group but not have 50% of the population.

I think about modeling race and modeling racial differences in a lot of ways, and in that paper I was just simply looking at the incremental change in the relationship between closures and gentrification attributable to a slight increase in a share of Black residents. 

In 2022, OUSD put out a list of schools that they wanted to close, and they had a higher percentage of Black students than OUSD overall. What have you found are the primary reasons that school districts say they close schools, and why does it typically end up being Black schools?

That’s the question of the day, right? The Harvard Ed piece that I reference provides a lot to this question, and I’ll do my best to quickly summarize. In general, when districts go about closing schools, there’s typically two buckets of rationale that are marshaled, right? One is about enrollment and budgetary issues. And those are bound up because enrollment and funding for students is oftentimes one and the same. So you have budget and enrollment issues, and then you have achievement-related issues, right? For the former, the justification there is that there are some schools that are simply too expensive to run. They’ve got either declining enrollment or have had historically low enrollment, given their best use case. And because of that, it would serve the district well by closing schools that are costing them a lot of money.

The odds that a Black school is closed is roughly four times that of non-Black schools.

Francis A. Pearman

The second justification about achievement being a precursor for closure, or at least a contributor for closure, has its origins in the No Child Left Behind policy in the early 2000s where closures actually began to be used as an accountability measure. So if schools aren’t doing well, they actually can become at risk of shutting down. So those are typically the two most commonly used justifications. 

In my work around closures there’s a couple things that I’ve come to understand. One is that the question of whether a district has to close a school is, oftentimes, if not always, justified. That is, a district is in need of slashing significant amounts of its budget, it’s in the red by a significant amount, and they’re looking for avenues to balance the budget. So you have districts that may be pushed into a situation in which they have to close the school, but what is not certain, by any stretch, is that a district has to close this or that school right? That decision of which school closes is entirely discretionary in a lot of ways. So what I’m interested in, the thing that keeps me up at night, is if it’s conditional on having to close the school, why is it that the schools that are targeted are oftentimes Black and brown schools, low-income schools? And so the Harvard Ed piece that I mentioned to you takes that issue head-on. It quantifies the extent to which majority-Black schools are more likely to close, which we’ve not had an estimate for. Community members are like, “It always happens.” Well, I can actually tell you exactly how much more likely it happens. The odds that a Black school is closed is roughly four times that of non-Black schools. 

The question then is, do those conventional explanations that I mentioned previously account for that difference? So maybe majority-Black schools are more likely to close than non-majority-Black schools, but maybe that’s because they are more likely to experience under enrollment or low enrollment, right? Maybe they’re just systematically more underperforming than their peers. And if that were the case, right now, we can ask the question of the extent to which those two factors are, themselves, the product of longstanding issues of racial equality and dispossession that have affected communities in all sorts of ways, but there would at least be an argument that there’s justifiable grounds for that inequality if those two factors accounted for the difference, or fully accounted for the difference. 

I would just plug school closures into that same apparatus that has time and time again been waged against Black and brown communities that have long called certain parts of cities their home.

Francis A. Pearman

What’s fascinating in that paper is that even after accounting for those differences, if you take two schools in the same district that have equivalent demographics, equivalent enrollment patterns, equivalent sizes that achieve at the same level, but one simply has more Black students than the other, the school that has more Black students is still about 25% more likely to close. That’s a big deal. These are national estimates, this is across the country. 

This pattern that people are feeling in their bones is true, but haven’t necessarily had data to support that, or at least a kind of data that holds a kind of power. We’ve known this anecdotally for a long time. In fact, a lot of that stuff bears out, right? So the question is, well, then why? How does that possibly happen? I mean, you could think about closures as any other form of community dispossession. That is, when it comes to making decisions about matters that are broadly understood as disruptive, we’ve known in the last century that when the most destructive or the most impactful urban change initiatives are pursued, those mechanisms are largely shouldered by Black and brown communities. Think of urban renewal in the ’40s and ’50s. People have written about this for 70 years. A lot of this is political. A lot of this is who has the power to resist these kinds of inconveniences. And I’m using that word very lightly, or at least that’s obviously a euphemism for much more visceral things. But the question of why — why does the highway get redirected through a Black neighborhood? Well, there’s a lot of decisions that have deep political consequences, and oftentimes it’s the communities that seemingly have less political power to resist those decisions that are on the receiving end of those decisions. And so that’s an unfortunate part of the history of our cities. I would just plug school closures into that same apparatus that has time and time again been waged against Black and brown communities that have long called certain parts of cities their home. 

You’ve found that school closures accelerate gentrification in neighborhoods where there’s higher shares of Black residents. Why is this something that school districts should be considering, if you think they should be considering it, when they’re making these decisions?

Where my mind immediately goes is how we think about the purposes of education and the purposes of our schools. There are different visions for what a schoolhouse is and the function it serves. Over time, we’ve increasingly thought about schools as this industry model that’s producing these widgets. And these widgets are these kids. It’s unsurprising that that sort of vision of the schoolhouse has emerged along with global trade and advanced-stage capitalism. But there’s other visions of what a schoolhouse is. There’s other visions of the schoolhouse rooted in community well-being and community health. It’s part of the lifeblood of the community. It’s part of the history of the community. It’s a source of community life. It’s a source of community cohesion. Now, those might seem like lofty aims, but in fact, that’s the role that many schools have served, particularly in communities that have not received the same sorts of government investment, public and private investment that other communities have. You can think of this as the model of where the community schools movement came from, or even the idea of schools that serve wraparound services. The promise and possibilities of how schools can support their communities also is quite different across communities. 

There’s a term that I use oftentimes in my work about school dependence. There’s some children who are, because of their socioeconomic conditions, more dependent on schools than other children for their basic necessities. In affluent middle class communities, oftentimes kids go to school to learn. But there’s this growing number of children — many in these fast-growing cities where homeless populations have just exploded. One of the fastest-growing populations of the homeless are homeless families with children. You have a significant number of children who are showing up to school not to learn but to eat. So the idea is that because of the holes in our social safety net, the institutions that have the most touch points with our most vulnerable households are schools. So if we think about schools from less of a widget standpoint and more of the role that they can play in social cohesion, in community well-being and even development, then concerns about closures adversely affecting your community become really important. And they become especially important in those communities for whom that school is actually serving a lot more purposes than this school in this particular part of the city where kids are going to be just fine regardless of what happens in the schoolhouse. 

I think about the way OUSD and district leaders talk about school closures, and they say, “Well, the kids will just go to the next school over,” as if they’re interchangeable.

When you shut down a school, you’re not just shutting down the school for current students. You’re also shutting down the school for former students.

Francis A. Pearman

I’ll probably write about this at some point, but there’s also this really important intergenerational piece of schools that they serve. And this is kind of related to the community cohesion thing, but maybe it’s a different idea. It’s like intergenerational cohesion at the community level. Like you think about McClymonds, you think about Castlemont, these schools with these incredible histories. They deserve to be museums and schools in terms of the folks who have called those schools their own, in terms of the impact they’ve had in Oakland and West Oakland. The alumni base is significant in both of these schools, right? And every year, homecoming means something. When you shut down a school, you’re not just shutting down the school for current students. You’re also shutting down the school for former students. And that’s a kind of loss as well that needs to be taken seriously.

When it comes to school closures and their disparate impacts on black communities, do you think that this is a problem that can be addressed through policy? I’m thinking of Assembly Bill 1912 [a 2022 bill that requires school districts to analyze and publish the equity impacts of proposed closures] for example.

Yeah, it certainly can help. I broadly have thought of myself as a school closure critic. Somebody who’s deeply skeptical of the ways that districts have gone about closing schools and how they just keep impacting Black and brown spaces, vulnerable schools, vulnerable communities. Or at least communities that haven’t been served particularly well. But in the last year, I found myself increasingly involved with school districts who are trying to do it the right way. And they’re essentially like, “All right, Professor Pearman, help us try to do this the right way. We have to do this. What can we do to make these impacts less disparate?”

So I’m actively in this game right now as somebody who’s tiptoeing into these decisions with a broad swath of data and critical lenses that I take to this work. I think a part of it has to do with a commitment of the district to democratizing the precarity of the closure process. Part of it is districts really prioritizing the idea that, look, this process is going to be equitable. It is going to be fair throughout the process — both in the decision-making process, but also in the aftermath of the decision-making process. And both of those are important. People oftentimes only think about asserting equity and incorporating equitable mechanisms into making the decision, but there’s a whole post-decision process that also needs to be thought about critically and with the same sorts of aims. I think AB 1912 fits within that general bucket of parameters that are made in the spirit of promoting equity. And it does so in a pretty straightforward way. It just asks, for instance, which populations are most affected? And you have to share that out. Those are important to do. 

I think one of the biggest areas of growth or development or support for districts is the data they use to make the decision. So as I mentioned previously, the two commonly used justifications have to do with enrollment, budgetary issues and then achievement. I told you that they couldn’t fully account for the racial disparity and closure rates. Black schools are more likely to close when you account for those factors. There’s still disparity there. Right now, those factors do actually account for some of it, but not all of them. Now, the fact that these factors account for some of it is also part of the problem, because if districts think, “OK, we’re not going to let politics drive this. We’re going to look empirically and just see which schools are underachieving, which schools have the lowest enrollment and just make the decision there.” What’s going to happen is your Black and brown schools are still going to be the ones to close, so the question that districts have to ask themselves is why some schools are systematically underperforming and systematically underenrolled relative to others.

When you begin to ask those questions, then you can start to come up with other solutions. And this is where really addressing and foregrounding issues of equity become really important. I’m not thinking of a particular school with this thought experiment, but if there’s a school that was sited next to an environmental hazard zone 50 years ago that was also the only place in a city where Black families could live, perhaps that area has been cleaned up, but that school today will likely be underenrolled because of a public perception about what this community has to endure over time, what types of adverse conditions a child might have to encounter if they go to that school right now. Is that those communities’ fault? No, there is a historical wrong that has not been righted, and we need to really be thinking about these kinds of broader patterns in productive ways.

Can you talk about some of the research you mentioned that you’re currently doing on the impact of closures on districts’ financial health?

One of the other assumptions that’s built into closure decisions is that, OK, we’re closing schools, and we’re helping ourselves financially right now. What’s interesting about that presumption as a guiding force in school closure deliberations is that we actually don’t have any evidence on that question. Like, you can’t point to studies that say, “Closing down this school yields this financial implication or this gain or this improvement.” And then, two, there’s actually reason to be skeptical beyond the first gains. OK, we’re shutting down the school, you’re no longer paying for the property. You’ve got fewer principals, that sort of thing. There’s actually reasons to be concerned about new costs. It actually costs money to board up buildings. New transportation patterns are likely going to be additional costs. Maintaining vacant property is not free. It actually comes with a cost. So some of these other considerations raise a question of, well wait a minute, let’s think about this, right? That’s what gave rise to the importance of asking this question.

In this paper, we’re looking at the implications of closures on the financial health of districts and equity within the districts. The last part of that question is about, if we close schools, are schools more equitable as a result of that? Because, again, part of the argument, that second bucket, had to do with achievement disparities. So if we’re closing low-performing schools, those students, in theory, should be going to better schools, and that’s better for the district. And then there’s racial dimensions to that as well that we want to be mindful of. If we close schools, maybe it impacts financial health in one direction or another. But along with that question, how is it impacting issues of equity? That’s what the paper is looking at. 

So districts close schools predominantly in Black and brown schools, those school districts are able to improve their bottom line a little bit, but they also worsen educational outcomes for Black and brown students.

Francis A. Pearman

To the first point, it turns out that school closures do, in fact, within a couple years, increase the odds that districts are able to balance their budget, both in terms of whether they’re balancing their budget and how much in the red they are reduces substantially. So on the first question of, do closures aid in the pursuit of financial health? The answer to that is, in fact, yes. Now it can take several years, but over time it does.

Now, what’s interesting about that paper is, again, we don’t stop there. We ask, OK, well, if you close schools, what are the implications on equity? What we find is that racial test score gaps actually widen post closure. So districts close schools predominantly in Black and brown schools, those school districts are able to improve their bottom line a little bit, but they also worsen educational outcomes for Black and brown students. That’s an interesting issue. 

Essentially, what are closures? They’re a book-balancing exercise that costs districts in terms of the well-being of their students of color. And that’s the pattern that we’ve observed for the last 20 years. Between 2009 and 2020 was when that paper was looking at those patterns. Moreover, in that paper, we also look at segregation patterns. And because closures disproportionately affect Black and brown schools. In fact, when districts close schools, the districts become more integrated. And people might wrongheadedly hear that finding. They’re like, “Oh, great, like we’re increasing integration.” But just to be clear, you can achieve integration by closing all the white schools, too. But in this case we’re just closing schools that predominantly serve students of color, but then also forcing these students to shoulder the burdens associated with those closures, which worsens their educational outcomes. Districts need to be acutely aware of that pattern. Like, yes, we can potentially achieve some financial goals in this process, but if we aren’t intentional, deeply intentional about how we’re doing it, we’re actually becoming more inequitable as a district.

Is there anything in your research that has surprised you? 

Yes, and it really is the research-to-practice part of my work. So I told you I’m engaging in work in other districts where I’m trying to help districts make decisions with regard to their school closure processes that are, in fact, more equitable. Most districts who champion ideas of equity, it’s easy for them to get on board with that idea in theory. I think what has surprised me is the various ways in which, when you democratize precarity, as I mentioned, different community groups advocate and organize. No one likes their schools to be closed. What we see in Oakland is hunger protests, teacher walkouts. These are forms of protests that are born of the idea that this community space matters to us and we don’t want it to be shut down. The notion of institutional precarity, again, is one that is quite common in Black and brown communities and spaces since the origin of this country. There are a lot of communities that have no idea what institutional precarity is. The idea that a beloved community institution could be just shut down for reasons outside of their control. 

In my experience, over last year, as some of these decisions have begun to affect a broader swath of the community, I’ve been surprised by just the protest. Protest is the same, but the tools used for protest can differ, right? So rather than dealing with a hunger protest, you’re dealing with parent groups of engineers and data scientists who pen 20-page rebuttals to this point and that point. But it’s the same thing. This is them saying, “Look, we love our community school, and we don’t want it to close.” So districts have to be ready to address and deal with new political resistance if they aim to be more equitable in this decision-making process. They’re not just going to be dealing with hunger protests. They’re going to be dealing with a whole swath of political mobilization, oftentimes very powerful political blocs, who are doing everything they can. For me, learning the scope and scale and depth of those alternative forms of protests have been surprising.

Are there any other presumptions around school closures that you feel are underresearched?

I think about effective ways to bridge, integrate, and displace students into new school bodies and new schools. And I’m not just talking about Black students going into less Black schools, but like any school that’s closed into a new school, I think there’s important work to be done about ways to to ensure that the social ecology of the new learning environment is maximized and structured in a way that can support the learning of both incoming students and returning students. 

I think that question grows out of the finding I mentioned from my most recent work about whether closures can actually serve as a financial boon. No, not a boon. That’s too strong a word. But if closures can actually help aid districts in achieving some modicum of financial improvement, but it’s also producing these inequitable outcomes, I think the question is, then, what kinds of closure decisions can produce less inequitable outcomes? And one that I’m actually just beginning to ask with a current student of mine. There’s important work around the politics of school boards and the actual decision-making that’s important to ask. Both in terms of political belief sets of school board members and how changes in school board compositions relate to which schools are being closed. So I think there’s some interesting questions about the role that school boards play, and the kind of the sociology of school board decision-making and how that relates to school closures that comes to mind. I’m going to spend the next 50 years of my life probably asking these questions. 

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