Starred Review In 2013, Chicago closed 49 public schools, 90-percent of them majority black. The city declared these schools underutilized and failing. But when the closures were announced, teachers, students, parents, and community members protested. If these schools were as awful as the city said, then why the fight to keep them? This question drives Ghosts in the Schoolyard, and to answer it, Ewing examines stories of specific school closures; longer histories of segregation on Chicago's South Side; how these schools, many named to honor historic African American leaders and thinkers, operated as bastions of community pride; and finally, how teachers and students mourned their schools once they were gone. The closed schools had real problems, like limited access to counselors and low graduation rates, but, Ewing argues, the city's explanations of these schools as "underutilized" and "underresourced" ignored the top-down policies that had produced the situation and limited how the city thought about solutions. Ewing's varied approach to the closures suggests there may also be a variety of solutions lutions that value local knowledge and real human experience. Ewing is a Harvard-trained sociologist as well as a poet (Electric Arches, 2017) and an educator (among other things), and this comes through in her lively and accessible writing.

Poet Ewing (Electric Arches), an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, revisits the 2013 closure of 54 Chicago public schools due to declining rates of enrollment in this bracing study of the third largest school system in the United States. Ewing focuses on three schools in Bronzeville, on Chicago-s South Side, most notably Dyett High School, where news of the school-s closure sparked a monthlong hunger strike among community members. Two questions permeate this study: -If the schools were so terrible, why did people fight for them so adamantly?- and -What role did race, power, and history play in what was happening in my hometown?- Ewing-s investigation looks at the development of selective enrollment schools, designed to expand the -choice- within the Chicago Public Schools system, in which students need not attend the schools in their immediate area, but can choose among schools across the city, a model that often puts black families with limited access to transportation, time, and information about schools at a disadvantage. The deeply moving final chapter addresses the Bronzeville community-s sense of mourning in the loss of -institutions, like our schools that have helped shape our sense of who we are.- Ewing-s work, a tribute to students, parents, teachers, and community members, is essential for general readers confronting the issues of -school choice- and school funding, as well as useful for historians of the African-American experience. (Oct.)