"Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools."
That's how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing
Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits
and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix
of pity and contempt.
But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student,
then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective
has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of
failures--they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart
of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring
people together.
Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel
announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched
simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to
declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were
dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest
from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad,
why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that
some would even go on a hunger strike?
Ewing's answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad
faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting
her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of
Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just
schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools--schools
that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs--as one more
in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet
another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to
build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.
