The press for accountability at the nexus of resilience, estrangement, hope, and inequity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the experience of school closure as narrated by youth in survey responses and as evident in school-level characteristics drawn from publicly available data during the 2010–2012 years of district reform in Cleveland, Ohio. Among ninth-grade students reporting closure of their K–8 schools, closed-ended survey data suggest nearly half of the students reporting ease in transitioning schools following school closure. Open-ended data offer a more nuanced story, with some students narrating loss of relationships, sense of uprooting, and emotional upset and others describing a fresh start, new friends, and discovery of self in the transition. Survey data also indicate regularity of changing schools and transportation challenges. A study of publicly available data, comparing student characteristics at the school level between receiving and non-receiving schools, indicates that schools that received students following closures were less likely to graduate students on time and were more likely to discipline students. Receiving schools were more likely to serve students who were identified as having cognitive, learning, and emotional disabilities. Though survey data portray both struggle and resilience, the study of student characteristics in schools receiving students displaced by closure suggests considerable strain on receiving schools, revealing conditions exacerbated in school closure for students of color, poor students, and students with disabilities.