A few years ago, a good friend and I were walking near downtown Philadelphia, not far from my old elementary school, Thomas C. Durham, on 16th and Lombard. The school was built on the edge of a black neighborhood in South Philly in the early 1900s, and its design earned it a spot on the National Register of Historic Places when I was in the third grade. I nudged my friend to take a quick detour with me. ... But memory was the only place that Durham — my Durham — still existed. The school had closed its doors in the late 1990s because of the city's crushing budget problems, and was later swept up in a wave of charter-ization that took over Philly after I graduated. The old Durham building now housed something called the Independence Charter School. My middle school, George C. Thomas in deeper South Philly, has undergone a similar conversion. They were part of a larger trend: In the past three years alone, Philadelphia has shuttered over 30 of its public schools. And because of the makeup of Philly's public school system, most of the students affected by all this upheaval have been less-resourced children of color.

So what happens to these places? Some became charters like Durham and Thomas; others were abandoned altogether. And then there are cases like Edward W. Bok High School in South Philly, a once well-known vocational-technical school that closed two years ago, found new life as the digs of a trendy hipster bar, and has become an inevitable flashpoint in the fight between the neighborhood's gentrifiers and the folks with older roots.

...

Different cities have taken various approaches over the past decade — more magnet schools, more charter schools, and breaking up big schools into several smaller schools that all use the same building. But as Cobb points out, when public education is the avenue we decide to use to address broader inequities in American life, it tends to end badly for the schools charged with all that heavy lifting.

"Both busing and school closure recognize the educational obstacles that concentrated poverty creates," he writes. "But busing recognized a combination of unjust history and policy as complicit in educational failure. In the ideology of school closure, though, the lines of responsibility — of blame, really — run inward. It's not society that has failed, in this perspective. It's the schools."