Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

Gentrification, School Closings, and Displacement in Chicago
Eve Ottenberg
27 Mar 2019
Gentrification, School Closings, and Displacement in Chicago
Gentrification, School Closings, and Displacement in Chicago

School closings are central to gentrification and Black dispersal from prime urban real estate.

“We are not included in the blueprint of the new Chicago. We’re being pushed out.”

Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side
Eve L. Ewing
University of Chicago Press

Beginning in 2013, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel unveiled an ambitious plan to shutter 330 underperforming public schools. The plan was soon whittled down to 54 schools citywide. Parents fought back in Bronzeville, an African American neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. If these schools were as terrible as Chicago Public Schools (CPS) officials claimed, then why did parents and other residents use every tool at their disposal, including hunger strikes, to keep them open? Eve Ewing, a University of Chicago’s School of Social Service assistant professor, who was born, raised and still lives in in the city, documents one community’s struggle against the fallout from gentrification in Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side.

The starkly different perceptions of what a neighborhood school means to a community can be chalked up to the perniciousness of segregation and structural racism. CPS officials had resorted to steep budget cuts, whittling away at the schools year after year. As families moved out of the area seeking better neighborhood schools, the student population dwindled. The school district finally fell back on a devious argument. The buildings, the officials said, were underutilized. But the Bronzeville schools also did not have enough assistant principals, counselors, or teachers. As one teacher told Ewing, who taught in Bronzeville before the closings: “People will take everything you have, then blame you for having nothing.” 

“CPS officials whittled away at the schools year after year.”

But where school system officials saw educational failure, parents saw vital African American institutions that had served families for generations. Parents developed close relationships with teachers and other school professionals—and some of them lived in the neighborhood. These families knew the teachers, participated in events at the schools, and continued school-based get-togethers after children graduated. The schools were like community centers, and teachers were familiar faces in the area. 

Ewing reports that these closures caused what she calls “institutional mourning,” the experience of  “individuals and communities facing the loss of a shared institution … such as a school.” Now these same institutions were at risk as wealthier white residents moved into black neighborhoods, attractively situated near Lake Michigan and the downtown Loop.  Bronzeville was deliberately slated for gentrification, parents believed, as part of the mayor’s plan to remake Chicago—and the local schools were in the way. With the real estate market in Bronzeville heating up, the school closings were a convenient way for city officials to clear the neighborhood of African American undesirables. Chicago Teachers’ Union president Karen Lewis called the closures “explicitly racist.”

“Bronzeville was deliberately slated for gentrification as part of the mayor’s plan to remake Chicago.”

Brash and outspoken, Emanuel had little use for teachers’ unions and supported charter schools, the centerpiece of neoliberal public education reform: Emanuel effectively moved to privatize public schools, where possible using public money to fund the private companies and groups that opened new charter schools. Test scores, of course, were key to closure decision-making process. If a school had low test scores, it would be subject to pedagogical and administrative interventions up to and including closure. 

The Chicago mayor has complete control of the school system, appointing all members of the school board including the chief executive officer, the system’s top official. So Emanuel became the target of Bronzeville’s enmity, especially since CPS showed little respect for parents or the wider community. There was little transparency about fundamental issues, including school closure hearing dates or any demonstrated concern about what would happen to students who were transferred elsewhere.

Parents believed that if student well-being was the issue, CPS should have deployed more academic supports and the requisite professionals to implement them. Moreover, CPS should have spent money to staff up and provide much needed textbooks and equipment to the old schools. “Students who experience school closures,” Ewing writes, “end up at new schools that are not thriving academically, so they don’t receive any boost or improvement in their education.” 

“Emanuel effectively moved to privatize public schools.”

Bronzeville’s school closings are linked, Ewing argues, to racial segregation dating from the Great Migration. As Southern migrants moved to the city in the early 20th century, bank officials conspired with realtors to keep them out of white neighborhoods. The establishment of low-income public housing in places like Bronzeville in the 1940s exacerbated this development. The city went on a public housing building spree in in part to keep black children in black neighborhoods. 

But as crime and drugs caused once flourishing public housing developments to spiral into decay, the city demolished many projects (like the Ida B. Wells Homes on the South Side). Families who could fled the area, leaving behind schools with fewer and fewer students. CPS forced more closures than the community believed were warranted: Similarly depopulated and thus “underutilized” schools in white neighborhoods did not experience as many closures.

Ewing focuses on three Bronzeville elementary schools that CPS determined were failing in 2013: Mayo, Overton, and Williams. CPS approached the closings, Ewing observes, “as if the timeline of everything we need to know somehow began with 2011 test scores.” CPS considered little else beyond test scores as criteria for closing schools, even though residents testified at closure hearings that CPS had facilitated the decline by ignoring the academic needs of the students and neglected to understand the important social supports they provided to neighborhood families.

“Bronzeville’s school closings are linked to racial segregation dating from the Great Migration.” 

Destablizing black families, Ewing argues, has a long, racist pedigree. “Historically the intentional disruption of the African American family has been a primary tool of white supremacy,” Ewing writes, “one with deep roots extending from the time of chattel slavery through the present era of mass incarceration.” CPS also ignored that relocation also put students’ lives at risk, since they were forced to navigate longer distances in gang-infested areas. One teacher Ewing interviewed worries about how “to make sure [the students] can actually walk to and from school.” 

But considerations of safety in a new environment, like the issues of poverty, hunger and homelessness that afflict many South Side students, are difficult to quantify when a CPS bureaucrat investigates school performance. If the old school has low-test scores and inadequate staffing and few students, why not close it, and send the students elsewhere? How the students get to that elsewhere and what that transition meant for their families was not part of the equation.

When CPS announced the closures, officials threw the community a bone: they held public hearings where parents and residents could air their opinions on an issue that had already been decided. One parent called the hearings “all bullshit. Public hearings are just there to let you talk. ‘We already know what we gonna do, but we’re giving you a chance to feel good about talking.’” 

“One parent called the hearings ‘all bullshit.’”

It seems entirely credible that CPS never intended to disrupt the mayor’s plans for these neighborhoods, which, Ewing says, positioned “the destruction of black institutions as a necessary step toward beautification or marketability.” As a group of student-poets wrote at the time: “We are not included in the blueprint of the new Chicago/We’re being pushed out/Our buildings being transformed into condos/ And we know those ain’t for us.”

Chicago is not alone. Philadelphia has also shuttered dozens of schools, mostly in African American neighborhoods. Indeed, in many cities with a large, low-income black population, school closings are a familiar phenomenon and the children and their families are so much collateral damage. Ewing’s focus on racism and gentrification lays bare the flaws in the often-heard argument that “these are lousy, dangerous schools and everyone’s better off without them.” She underscores how that view conceals the stealthy forces of displacement and the pain of the dispossessed. Or, as Ewing puts it: “A school is a home. So when they come for your schools, they’re coming for you. And after you’re gone, they’d prefer you be forgotten.”

This article previously appeared in The American Prospectand Portside.

COMMENTS?

Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport

Or, you can comment by emailing us at [email protected]

gentrification

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles. Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


Related Stories

Maxwell Evans
South Side Neighbors Want Housing Protections Before City OKs ‘Luxury’ Hotel Near Obama Center
07 May 2025
Community residents say that Chicago's City Council should pass a slate of housing protections centered on low-income renters instead of advanc
Jon Jeter
John Mearsheimer’s Folly: How Whites Agree to Misinterpret the World to Fulfill Their Racial Contract
23 October 2024
Systemic racism and reactionary violence are embedded into the foundation of the US political and social system, despite false claims of any so
Chocolate City: Ground Zero for the White Settler's Reclamation Project
Jon Jeter
Chocolate City: Ground Zero for the White Settler's Reclamation Project
12 October 2022
Washington DC was once known as Chocolate City. After years of gentrification Black residents are now a minority of the population.
The City Has Failed University City Townhome Residents. They Should Pay For It — Literally
Ernest Owens
The City Has Failed University City Townhome Residents. They Should Pay For It — Literally
17 August 2022
The traumatizing clearing of the University City Townhome encampment in West Philadelphia symbolizes the ongoing racial injustice of gentrifica
The Obama Presidential Center Will Displace Black People
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
The Obama Presidential Center Will Displace Black People
13 October 2021
The Obama Presidential Center will inevitably displace a working class Black community in Chicago.
Gentrification and the End of Black Communities
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
Gentrification and the End of Black Communities
25 August 2021
Census data show that gentrification is accelerating Black displacement.
Rubble Kings: How the Violence Stopped and Hip Hop Emerged in the South Bronx
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Rubble Kings: How the Violence Stopped and Hip Hop Emerged in the South Bronx
04 November 2020
A fact-based, crowd-funded film on urban devastation and gang warfare in the South Bronx packs a bigger political punch than the cult classic,
Philadelphia Agrees to Provide Community Housing Amid Unhoused Activist Push
Lexi McMenamin
Philadelphia Agrees to Provide Community Housing Amid Unhoused Activist Push
04 November 2020
Organizers vow to continue the fight for housing on the heels of these tremendous victories.
Tearing Down Black America
Brent Cebul
Tearing Down Black America
29 July 2020
More than half the 1.2 million Americans displaced by “urban renewal” were Black.
The Expanded Moms4Housing Bill Could Change the Whole Game
Broke-ass Stuart
The Expanded Moms4Housing Bill Could Change the Whole Game
26 February 2020
Although the moms were evicted, their example inspired ground-breaking housing legislation for Oakland, California. 

More Stories


  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Ryan Coogler, Shedeur Sanders, Karmelo Anthony, and Rodney Hinton, Jr
    07 May 2025
    Black people who are among the rich and famous garner praise and love, and so do those who are in distress. But concerns for the masses of people and their struggles are often missing.
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    LETTER: Thank you, Mr. Howe, Ama Ata Aidoo, 1967
    07 May 2025
    Ama Ata Aidoo lands a knock-out blow to white neocolonial anti-African revisionism.
  • Jon Jeter
    The Only Language the White Settler Speaks: Ohio Police Say Grieving Black Father Avenges Son’s Slaying By Killing One of Theirs
    07 May 2025
    The killing of Timothy Thomas in 2001 ignited Cincinnati’s long-simmering tensions over police violence. This struggle continues today, forcing a painful question: When justice is denied, does…
  • Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    DOGE— Department Of Grifter Enrichment
    07 May 2025
    "DOGE— Department Of Grifter Enrichment" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
  • Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
    BAR Book Forum: Brittany Friedman’s Book, “Carceral Apartheid”
    07 May 2025
    In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Brittany Friedman. Friedman is assistant professor of sociology at the University of…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us