Ghosts in the schoolyard :

"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.

Reviews (4)

School Library Journal Review

In 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that dozens of Chicago's public schools would be shut down. Eventually 49 neighborhood schools in largely black sections of the Windy City closed, an unprecedented move that sparked immediate backlash. "A fight for a school is never just about a school," Ewing (University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration) notes in her bracing account of that turbulent time, relying on a blend of historical and ethnographic research to show how the closures were only the most recent manifestation of a decades-long pattern of disinvestment by Chicago Public Schools. In one chapter, the author describes how grassroots movements staged effective protests that ultimately led to one community saving their high school from the chopping block. In another, Ewing -examines the grieving process that parents, students, and alumni undergo when their institutions are lost. Most important, this book effectively connects school closings in largely African American neighborhoods to the devaluation of black lives in general. VERDICT Ewing's graceful prose enlivens what might otherwise be a depressing topic in this timely, powerful read. Recommended to public, high school, and university -libraries.-Seth Kershner, Northwestern -Connecticut -Community College Library, Winsted © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publisher's Weekly Review

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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*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 solutions 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.--Maggie Taft Copyright 2018 Booklist

Library Journal Review

In 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that dozens of Chicago's public schools would be shut down. Eventually 49 neighborhood schools in largely black sections of the Windy City closed, an unprecedented move that sparked immediate backlash. "A fight for a school is never just about a school," Ewing (Univ. of Chicago Sch. of Social Service Administration) notes in her bracing account of that turbulent time, relying on a blend of historical and ethnographic research to show how the closures were only the most recent manifestation of a decades-long pattern of disinvestment by Chicago Public Schools. In one chapter, the author describes how grassroots movements staged effective protests that ultimately led to one community saving their high school from the chopping block. In another, Ewing -examines the grieving process that parents, students, and alumni undergo when their institutions are lost. Most important, this book effectively connects school closings in largely African American neighborhoods to the devaluation of black lives in general. VERDICT Ewing's graceful prose enlivens what might otherwise be a depressing topic in this timely, powerful read. Recommended to public, high school, and university libraries.-Seth Kershner, Northwestern Connecticut -Community Coll. Lib., Winsted © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Terms and People	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
1 What a School Means	p. 15
2 City of Losses	p. 53
3 Dueling Realities	p. 94
4 Mourning	p. 125
Conclusion: An Open Door	p. 157
Acknowledgments	p. 167
Appendix: Methodological and Theoretical Notes	p. 173
Notes	p. 187
Bibliography	p. 203
Index	p. 219

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