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作者

Stephanie Farmer;Chris D. Poulos;Ashley Baber

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.42,Issue4,P.511-533

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

Roosevelt University

摘要

Corporate education reformers take for granted that market competition in the public schools system will improve education conditions. We conducted a spatial analysis of Chicago Public Schools, examining the spatial features of charter school expansion in relation to under-18 population decline, school utilization, and school closure locations. Our findings indicate that 69% of new charter schools were opened in areas with significantly declining under-18 population and approximately 80% of charter schools were opened within walking distance of closed school locations. Our findings show, contrary to corporate education reform logic, that a competitive charter school market created spatial and financial inefficiencies resulting in school closures and systemwide budgetary cuts primarily impacting distressed neighborhoods. We explain the overproduction of charter schools through the lens of the firm-like behavior of charter school operators driven by a self-interested growth mandate that can undermine the stability of the public schools system as a whole. Introduction Chicago Public Schools (CPS) again received attention from national media and policymakers after a summer 2017 announcement of school consolidations and mergers (Strauss, 2018). The contested school action plan, which aimed to close five public schools in Chicago’s predominately Black South Side neighborhood of Englewood, came on the heels of a 5-year school closure moratorium imposed after the historic decision to close 50 schools in 2013 (FitzPatrick, 2018; Masterson, 2017). Ostensibly, the plan was meant to grapple with CPS’s problems of underenrollment by opening a new $85 million public school and two charter schools in place of the shuttered schools. This response to underenrollment and educational quality is far from novel. It fits into a sustained model of corporate education reform centered on marketizing public education, which has taken place over the prior 2 decades. These reformers aimed to reconstitute public education to mimic competitive markets through the introduction of a menu of school “choice” options for parents and students and imposing market-like discipline on low-performing schools, mainly through closure and privatization (Lubienski, 2005, 2013; Miron & Nelson, 2002). The resulting prodigious rise in charter schools, comprising the lion’s share of “choice” schools in Chicago, and school closures have become familiar phenomena for CPS students and parents over the prior 2 decades. The profound transformation of Chicago’s school system has been based on an underlying assumption that a competitive school market will yield an efficient allocation of school resources and improve educational outcomes (Berends, 2015; Chapman & Donnor, 2015; Hankins & Martin, 2006; Lubienski, 2003; Ravitch, 2010). The assumption bears scrutiny because it has again been proposed as the panacea to the problems of enrollment and educational quality in CPS, the fourth largest school district in the United States, and yet is undergirded by dubious academic and equity outcomes (Lubienski, 2013). The scholarship highlighting the inequalities produced by school choice (Bunka, 2011; Chapman & Donnor, 2015; Logan & Burdick-Will, 2015) has prompted a line of critical inquiry investigating the public–private machinations that promote the expansion of school choice policy (Lubienski, 2013). We contribute to the critical investigation of school choice as an improvement in urban education conditions by articulating a framework that locates charter expansion at the crossroads of marketization and spatial strategies. Research has demonstrated that the locational decisions of charter operators place market stratagems to increase student enrollment over and above educational demand (Burdick-Will, Keels, & Schuble, 2013; Gulosino & Lubienski, 2011). Our article (a) clarifies a conceptual framework of the spatial strategies of charter operators ensconced in marketized school districts and (b) investigates the broader implications of these strategies on neighborhood stability and the stability of the school district as a whole. We conducted an analysis of CPS between 2000 and 2015 to investigate the spatial claim of the market model of education that charter school locational decisions should meet and match demand. Charter schools, for instance, should be locating near overcrowded schools to relieve (and capture) high demand. Inefficiencies resulting from market-driven decision making will manifest spatially through an inefficient clustering of charter schools. We use these findings to contribute to literature on budgetary stress caused by charterization. Our spatial analysis and framework capture the validity, inner workings, and consequences of charter operators’ firm-like imperative to increase market share. Our research and analysis push back against contested yet commonly implemented market-oriented reforms, which continually re-emerge in the face of questions of budgetary shortfalls, education quality, and enrollment issues. Rather than ignore the basic assumptions of corporate education reformers, we aim to illustrate the spatial inefficiencies engendered by a context of heightened school competition. We conclude with three lessons for policymakers and school decision-making authorities. Literature review There is consensus that the variegation, path dependency, and temporality of charter school programming and expansion in urban areas is inseparable from marketization, the process by which public education is reconstituted according to market principles and decision-making power is transferred to private sector actors (Lubienski, 2005, 2013; Miron & Nelson, 2002). According to proponents of marketization, expanding the menu of school options, or school “choice,” empowers parents and children to select an educational environment best suited to their needs. This increases intradistrict competition for students and fiscal resources, which subjects low-performing schools to disciplinary market pressures, ultimately weeding them out of the school district entirely through closure or privatization. Innovation, improved school quality, and financial efficiency are cited as three advantages of promoting market-oriented school policy (Betts, 2005; Dee & Fu, 2003; Dempster, 2013; Gronberg, Jansen, & Taylor, 2012). Charter schools have been the primary vehicle through which choice has been introduced into urban education systems. They provide parents and students with a school option outside the traditional attendance boundary neighborhood school, which increases competitive market-like pressures within the system as a whole and especially on nearby schools (Lipman, 2011; Lubienski, 2013). According to charter advocates, increasing the field of marketization in public education systems increases the salience of consumer demand as a causal mechanism in charter school growth and locational decisions. However, the mixed results of charter education quality as they continue to grow suggest that market expansion operates in a far more complex manner that is disconnected from consumer demand (Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2009; Loveless, 2013; Zimmer et al., 2009). Empirical work on the effects of marketization challenges the consumer demand argument, suggesting that competitive market pressures sever the programmatic and locational decisions of charter schools from consumer needs. Market pressures to attract students, for instance, contribute to isomorphic tendencies of charter schools to devote disproportionate resources to marketing over and above academics, operations, and extracurricular activities (Jabbar, 2015; Kasman & Loeb, 2013; Lubienski, 2005). Charter schools have also been found to use cream-skimming, which are practices and policies used to retain high-performing students by weeding out low-performing and high-needs students. Additionally, cream-skimming relies on a heightened punitive environment, which contributes to disproportionate resources being placed in disciplinary-related operations costs over and above social service–related costs, like special education, English learning, and social work (Brown, Gutstein, & Lipman, 2009; Lacireno-Paquet, Holyoke, Moser, & Henig, 2002; Miron & Nelson, 2002; Silverman, 2013). Marketization and charter operators’ locational decisions take on a spatial dimension as well. Although a number of factors structure locational decisions, including the institutional context, political climate, and the type of charter school (network versus independent), empirical work has found that charter schools use locational decisions to gain competitive advantages, such as locating in areas that increase their opportunity to target less-risky socioeconomic and demographic student populations (Gulosino & Lubienski, 2011). This causes them to locate in relatively higher-needs areas but out of the reach of the most disadvantaged students (Henig & MacDonald, 2002; LaFleur, 2016; Rich & Jennings, 2015). This holds true when controlling for educational demand (Burdick-Will et al., 2013). These strategies are reflected in the student composition of charter schools as well, which tend to educate students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds relative to the student body of nearby neighborhood schools (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, Wang, & Civil Rights Project, 2010; Silverman, 2013). Studies also have found that charter schools may contribute to increased racial segregation across schools (Chapman & Donnor, 2015). The programmatic and locational inefficiencies and inequalities of charter school growth, alongside the obstinate resolve of urban politicians and policymakers to pursue charterization, have prompted researchers to examine alternative explanations of charter school expansion (Lubienski, 2013). We turn to an overview of the political–economic explanations of charter school growth, which critically interrogate consumer demand as a causal mechanism of charterization in search of more compelling explanatory vehicles to account for the prodigious rise of charter schools in urban areas. After establishing these causes, we promote a spatial dimension of marketization as a conceptual framework capable of grappling with the geographic dynamics intrinsic to the burgeoning school space economy. Macropolitical and economic forces A sizable body of research shows that charterization has been overdetermined by macropolitical–economic factors, including the formation of hegemonic coalitions around marketizing education, the influence of money in education reform, and neoliberal urbanization (Lipman, 2011; Ravitch, 2010; Saltman, 2013). The charter model acted as the mortar cobbling together local and national coalitions around the question of “failing” public schools, which characterized education debates in the 1980s. The public–private, choice-oriented charter model, which came to dominate education policy by the early 2000s, infused a suitable blend of market mechanics into public school systems, which appealed to a range of education reformers with a variety of interests and visions for public education. These included Republicans (advocating for outright voucherization of school districts); Democrats (searching for a “third-way” solution capable of moving away from the Keynesian-era social welfare state); local teachers and activists (seeking to carve out a space in public school systems to address race and class antagonisms and develop social justice focused curriculum); an alliance of Black politicians, preachers, and nonprofits (motivated by civil rights concerns for education equality in Black schools); urban political elites (navigating city building in an age of austerity and increasingly mobile capital); and moneyed elites (seeking investment outlets and more control over the management and ownership of public services). The charter bargain coalesced and organized these varying interests under a unified banner of school choice reform by articulating an immediate and pragmatic response to the concrete problems of public school systems, which were faced with the compounding problems of austerity, persisting class and race antagonisms, and poor test scores (Akers, 2012; Ravitch, 2010). A particularly influential constituency empowered by the charter coalition are moneyed elites, who wield influence over public policy through corporate foundations and board interlocks, which direct and coordinate resources through an array of organizations with the broader aim of increasing private elite control and management of public education (Lipman, 2011; Lubienski, 2013). Elite philanthropic foundations operate through behind-the-scenes political channels, making strategic campaign contributions, and writing key pieces of legislation to enhance state support for charter expansion while minimizing regulations in a protracted war of position for corporate education reform. They also contribute to constructing a dense network of pro-charter organizations by financing an array of policy and community organizations, including think tanks and “AstroTurf” community organizations, which form into politically coherent networks that support pro-market reform policy, galvanize public support for charter schools, and diminish resistance to marketization (Akers, 2012). Finally, the ascendancy of the charter model is explained by recourse to the shifting institutional context of neoliberal urbanization. A convergence of political–economic forces, including fiscal austerity, federal devolution, and interurban competition for mobile and scarce capital has fostered a shift from managerial to entrepreneurial urban governance strategies characterized by the promotion of business-friendly practices and policies (Harvey, 1989; Weber, 2003). Education reform has been a central component of entrepreneurial policies. The machinations of urban growth machines have been crucial agents in articulating and institutionalizing marketization through charter schools (Hankins & Martin, 2006). School policy has also been used as a place-based promotion strategy to attract global business and encourage gentrification in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia (Smith & Stovall, 2008; Tomeka & Oakley, 2013). Charter school expansion was also pursued as a political strategy to accomplish neoliberal fiscal austerity. Marketized charter schools are said to enable political officials to deliver high-quality education at lower costs to the public, pursed by reducing the influence of special interests groups, like teachers unions, and allowing a nimbler competitive market to allocate revenues to meet demand (Dempster, 2013; Lipman, 2011) This would allow states to deliver education at lower costs compared to traditional public education systems. Fiscal impact of charter schools on host districts Growing concerns over municipal fiscal strain and large-scale municipal and school district bankruptcies have prompted a growing body of scholarly research to examine the fiscal effects of charter school expansion on school districts. Their findings call into question the basic claim of charter advocates that the increased presence of charter schools allows states to capture fiscal efficiencies and does not generate financial harm to school districts. According to charter advocates, charter schools draw their student body from host districts and receive the same or less in per pupil subsidies. As such, charter schools reallocate students at the same or lower cost (Baker, 2016). To the contrary, empirical evidence suggests that charter schools place fiscal stress on school districts by decreasing overall revenue, diverting money from traditional public schools, and fostering an inefficient reallocation of revenues. Arsen and Ni (2012) provide evidence of the former. They found that charter competition in Michigan school districts had large, significant negative effects on district fund balances (the standard bottom-line measure used to indicate district fiscal health). Furthermore, districts that experienced large charter expansion saw revenues decline faster than costs. Cook (2016) shed some light on the mechanisms underlying the fall in revenue in response to charter competition in a study of Ohio school districts. First, charter competition depresses appraised housing valuation, which is a source of local tax revenue for schools. Second, traditional public school districts respond to competition by allocating resources toward new capital construction. A 1% increase in charter competition in Ohio school districts amounted to a 7% increase in capital outlays. According to Cook (2016), expenditures on capital projects may be used by traditional public schools as a signal of school quality, in order to compete with charter schools. Other studies have found that charter expansion diverts revenue from traditional public schools (see Ladd & Singleton, 2017 for research on North Carolina school districts; Bifulco & Reback, 2014, on New York school districts; and Cook, 2016, for research on Ohio school districts). The magnitude of the fiscal impact of charter expansion hinges on a range of factors, including the share of students migrating to charter schools, the types of students who enroll in charter schools, and, perhaps most salient, the fiscal flexibility of school districts to contend with and adjust to these changes (Baker, 2016; Ladd & Singleton, 2017). Bifulco and Reback (2014) argued that these adverse effects were caused by school districts’ lack of capacity to adjust fixed costs (building maintenance and operations) in response to charter growth. Moody’s Investors Services highlighted a similar concern in “economically weak” urban school districts, as did consultants hired by the Nashville, Tennessee, school district to study the impact of charter schools on their district (Baker, 2016). Furthermore, the lack of intradistrict coordination of revenue and expenditures ties into the underlying inefficiencies caused by “operating two systems of public schools under separate governance arrangements” (Bifulco & Reback, 2014, p. 1) and the liberal approval process for new charter schools (Baker, 2016). Charter school operators as firms We examine charter expansion through the two interlocking and co-constitutive dimensions of marketization and spatial strategies. Marketization fosters a competitive growth logic compelling charter schools to open new schools as a means of jockeying for scarce resources in school districts. In this context, charter schools effectively operate as firms in a marketplace aiming above all else to increase their “market share” of students and revenue streams in order to grow in scale and scope and drive competitors out of business. There are many strategies that charter schools can pursue to grow their presence in a market and attract students. Among these are engaging in new, and comparatively more expensive, greenfield building construction to get a leg up in the competition for enrollments (Cook, 2016; Jabbar, 2015). Charters can also reduce cost by capturing economies of scale through expanding the number of schools they operate, consequently replacing the “ma and pa” stand-alone charter school model with more robust charter school networks. Economies of scale concentrate and centralize economic resources and administrative activity and allow charter schools to accumulate student headcounts. Charter schools effectively operate as districts within districts, which may allow them to capture the sizeable potential cost savings in instructional and administrative costs that accompany increasing enrollment above 2,000 students (Andrews, Duncombe, & Yinger, 2002; Baker, 2016). Charters can also reduce their overhead by externalizing costs onto the public by lobbying the state to subsidize expenses, like new facilities, or absorb some of the cost and risk of finance (Berry, 2015; Teresa & Good, 2017). State subsidies can reduce the primary barrier of entry into education markets—the upfront, lumpy, and sunk capital expenditure for greenfield facility acquisition. However, charter school networks and advocates can have a conflicting relationship to the countervailing tendencies of the neoliberal state to minimize taxes and contract public expenditures. Austerity governments adopting charter schools are motivated by expected efficiencies and cost-cutting strategies that charters offer and may be resistant to providing desirable (from the point of view of charter operators) levels of funding. Elite corporate education foundations can use their political influence and money power with entrepreneurial-oriented governments to secure greater revenue streams for market education reforms (Jabbar, 2015; Lubienski, 2005). The increasing field of competition in school districts and the public–private machinations fostering charter growth take on a spatial dimension, which reinforces and grounds market-induced inequalities and inefficiencies in space and in the structure of the provision of urban education. Each dimension has a growth logic engendering its own contradictions, which can be mitigated, emboldened, and mediated by the other logic. The inequalities resulting from locational strategies to gain a competitive advantage (Gulosino & Lubienski, 2011) are amplified by a competitive context promoting an expansionary tendency of charterization. The fixity of charter expansion is inherently antagonistic to the expansionary market logic itself as space is finite, especially in the purview of strategic spatial decisions for charter operators, and increasingly so with each additional charter school opened. This encourages the possibility and, in a marketized urban education system like CPS, the tendency that “rational” decisions to gain competitive advantage will transform into systemic inefficiencies in the overall allocation of education. Although spatial strategies can operate semi-autonomously of marketization (for example, a social mission may hold primacy in the locational decision making of an independent charter operator), the expanding field of competition in public education systems increasingly hangs the survival of charter operators on market acumen. Our political economy of the education space economy expands on the extant literature discussed above by grappling with the spatiality of the public–private machinations that expand the field of marketization. We critically interrogate the consumer demand arguments by illustrating how inefficiencies and inequalities of marketization become amplified as they are locked in space through charter school expansion. In regards to the latter, we highlight that the market logic influencing charter school operators’ locational decisions become grounded in real places and have cascading effects on the stability of local neighborhood schools and the broader allocation of resources in school systems. Data and methods The data for our project were collected from several government databases and publicly available sources. Spatial data for all currently open CPS neighborhood public schools was retrieved from the City of Chicago Data Portal (2016). Additional data on school closures, which are unavailable on the City of Chicago Data Portal, came from three sources. We cross-referenced schools that were closed between 2000 and 2013, with data obtained from the Chicago Teachers Union and WBEZ, a local public radio outlet (Lutton, Vevea, & Karp, 2013). These sources provided both the reason for closure and the address of the school. We geocoded the addresses using Esri Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping software (Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc., 2016). School utilization data were downloaded from Apples 2 Apples in CPS, which compiles data from CPS and the Illinois State Board of Education (Apples 2 Apples in Chicago Public Schools, 2012). Lastly, population data on children under 18 were provided by the Longitudinal Tract Database (LTDB), which collected U.S. census tract–level data between 1970 and 2010. “Children under the age of 18” was used to determine the potential pool of students for both CPS and charter schools (ages 5 to 17) and projecting the trend of soon-to-be students (ages 0–5). The LTDB provides a crosswalk geography, which is a common spatial unit over time. The benefit of the LTDB’s crosswalk methodology, created by Logan, Xu, and Stults (2012), is in overcoming the modifiable areal unit problem caused by changing census tract boundaries across U.S. Census surveys. This allowed us to study demographic changes in the population of children under the age of 18 using spatially consistent census tract boundaries housing Chicago schools between 1990 and 2010. Using GIS mapping software, we conducted a spatial analysis of charter school expansion in the city of Chicago from the years 2000 to 2015 in order to interrogate theories of the drivers and effects of charter school locational decisions. According to a market model of the spatial efficiency of education, charter school location should meet and match demand. For example, we would expect to see charter schools locate in neighborhoods with overcrowded schools (i.e., areas with high demand for new school relief) and few to locate in neighborhoods where the under-18 population decline was greater than what was occurring generally throughout the city. According to our theoretical framing, on the other hand, inefficiencies resulting from market-driven decision making will manifest spatially through a clustering of charter schools in increasingly limited and inefficient places for “competitive” advantage. We operationalized efficiency as student demand, which was measured using three variables: school closures, under-18 population change by census tract (2000–2010), and school utilization. School closure data were available on a yearly basis from 2000 to 2015. School-aged population was measured as aged 18 and under for the general population and 15 and under for population by race. The age discrepancy was due to data availability on the LTDB. We used median population change in Chicago between 2000 and 2010 (−19%, which we rounded to −20%) to delineate a baseline for population loss by census tract. Utilization rates were determined using CPS’s efficiency measurement in their 2013 school closure decisions. The Chicago Board of Education used 30 students per classroom as a baseline and determined that school buildings were “efficient” if their enrollments were in the range between 20% below (24 students) or 20% above (36 students) the baseline. Schools were categorized as “underutilized” if they had enrollments below the 24-student efficiency metric and “overutilized,” or overcrowded, if they had enrollments above 36 students per classroom. Because CPS utilization metrics came under fire by parent organizations and the Chicago Teachers Unions (Cox, 2013), we provide a visual confirmation of CPS’s utilization metric and population decline. In order to determine spatial efficiency, we recorded the count and proportion of charter schools that opened within 0.75 miles (6 blocks) and 1.5 miles (12 blocks) of closed schools from 2000 to 2015 and the three categories of school utilization. The 1.5-mile buffer was chosen to reflect the distance that CPS deemed as the acceptable walking distance to school for children. Due to the expanse of the 1.5-mile buffer, we also investigated the areas within half the distance, or 0.75 miles, to demonstrate the spatial relationship. In regards to population change, we record the count and proportion of charter schools opened by census tract. According to the consumer demand thesis, we would expect to see charter schools opening near overcrowded schools and away from closed schools, due to underutilization. Additionally, charter schools would be expected to open in census tracts with growth rates at or above the median change in student population. Background on CPS CPS oversees 660 schools, educating just under 400,000 children. CPS mainly educates low-income and working-class children of color. Eighty-five percent of CPS students are Black and Latinx children, and over half of the students come from low-income families. CPS has had a troubled reputation since President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education William Bennett declared CPS the nation’s worst public schools system in 1987. In response, Mayor Richard M. Daley engaged in a marketized reform of CPS promoting a school choice policy (Lipman, 2011) by introducing a portfolio of schools, giving parents a greater number of school options. The portfolio school model included selective enrollment, magnet, gifted, and neighborhood public schools as well as the expansion of privatized charter schools. To advance Mayor Richard M. Daley’s school choice goal, CPS drafted its Renaissance 2010 (“Ren10”) school reform initiative in 2004, calling for the closure of 60 to 70 low-performing neighborhood schools and the opening of 100 new choice schools—about two thirds of which would be charter schools. CPS and Chicago Board of Education opted to shrink the number of its public school options by using low-performance criteria, usually measured by standardized tests, attendance reports, and graduation rates, to close public schools. Throughout the first wave of school closures during the Ren10 period (2001–2009), CPS closed nearly a dozen schools per year, primarily for low performance and some for low enrollments, for a combined total of 73 public school closures, while opening 87 new schools, 62 of which were charters (Weber, Farmer, & Donoghue, 2016). School closures created demand for new schools as students displaced by the closures could either enroll in their assigned “receiving” public school (their new boundary area public school) or apply to new choice schools. Closed neighborhood school buildings also freed up facilities for charter schools; 40% of CPS’s neighborhood school buildings closed during Ren10 later housed privatized charter school operators (Lutton et al., 2013). In the face of evidence that school closures were concentrated in Black communities and did not lead to better school options, parents, students, community organizations, and Chicago Teachers Union members met potential closings with strong protests (de la Torre, Gordon, Moore, & Cowhy, 2015). By 2011, CPS, under the direction of the new mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, took a different approach to school closures. In this second wave of school closures, CPS emphasized that low-performing schools would primarily be closed due to low enrollments (underutilization) in order to “right size” the district. The Emanuel administration’s “right sizing” strategy emphasized that declining enrollments led to inefficient use (or underutilization) of costly school facilities. Officials pointed to the 2000–2010 census that revealed that the city of Chicago had lost 200,000 residents, 130,000 of whom were children, to explain CPS’s declining enrollments. In order to more efficiently allocate resources, CPS needed to close its underenrolled schools and shift those resources to other, more efficiently enrolled schools. Using the Chicago Board of Education’s “underutilization” metric, CPS shuttered 49 so-called underutilized schools, almost 10% of its entire school stock, at the end of the 2012–2013 school year. Like the previous wave of closures, 90% of impacted students were Black and a disproportionate number were students with learning disabilities (de la Torre et al., 2015; Waitoller, Rodsinsky, Traszka, & Maggin, 2014). Findings Our data shows that between 2000 and 2015, CPS engaged in 167 school actions that resulted in a school closing. Because 42 of the 167 closed schools were “turnaround” schools and reopened to the same children as neighborhood public schools, we excluded these school actions from the list of neighborhood public schools that stayed closed. We count the 15 neighborhood public schools that were closed and reopened as public schools with some kind of exclusive enrollment criteria as closed neighborhood public schools. Our count also includes the 31 closed neighborhood public school buildings that were reopened as charter schools. Because charter schools are not limited by boundary attendance areas and accept citywide applications that may force them to select their student body via lottery draw, they do not necessarily have to make space for neighborhood children. Therefore, a total of 125 boundary-area neighborhood public schools were closed to neighborhood children in the 2000–2015 period. Also during this time, CPS opened 108 new nonprofit charter schools and 41 new public schools (mostly choice selective enrollment, magnet, and gifted schools that have exclusive enrollment requirements and alternative high schools), totaling 149 new schools altogether. 1 By our criteria, CPS opened 16% more schools than it closed in the 2000–2015 period. School choice reform transformed the Chicago school district into a competitive charter school market whereby 51 nonprofit charter school operators managed the new charter schools. Fifteen of these operators are charter school networks responsible for operating two or more charter schools, and the remaining 36 schools were operated by independent charters. Of the 108 new charter schools between 2000 and 2015, nearly 80% were opened within walking distance of a closed public school. Table 1 breaks down school closures and charter school openings every 5 years to provide a sense of the pace of charter expansion over the 15-year period studied. In any given period, 62% to 91% of charter schools were opened within 0.75 and 1.5 miles of a closed school. The peak years fell between 2005 and 2009.Challenging the market logic of school choice: A spatial analysis of charter school expansion in ChicagoAll authorsStephanie Farmer, Chris D. Poulos & Ashley Baberhttps://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2018.1555437Published online:07 January 2019 Table 1. Charter schools opened within 1.5 and 0.75 miles of a closed school, 2000–2015, Chicago, Illinois.a CSVDisplay Table To untangle the sequence of charter openings and school closures, we used GIS to visualize the temporal rhythms of charter school openings and school closures. Figure 1 provides visual evidence of charter schools opening in proximity to public schools that were closed. These sets of maps divide school closures in to two categories: the Ren10 period of school reform (2000–2009) and the 2013 wave of school closures. Between 2000 and 2010, 74 schools were closed and 67 charter schools were opened. Eighty-five percent of the new charter schools were located within a 1.5-mile radius of closed schools, with 61% located within 0.75 miles. Similarly, 71% of new charter schools opened between 2000 and 2012 were located within a 1.5-mile radius of the 49 schools closed due to low enrollments in 2013. The third map in Figure 1 shows that over half of charter schools opened after the 2013 school closure wave were within walking distance of those closed schools. Over the 15-year period, 79% of charter schools were opened within 1.5 miles of a closed school and over half (56%) were opened within 0.75 miles.Challenging the market logic of school choice: A spatial analysis of charter school expansion in ChicagoAll authorsStephanie Farmer, Chris D. Poulos & Ashley Baberhttps://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2018.1555437Published online:07 January 2019 Figure 1. Where neighborhood schools close and where charters open, 2000–2015, Chicago, Illinois. Display full size Figure 1. Where neighborhood schools close and where charters open, 2000–2015, Chicago, Illinois. Figure 2 shows a lag between the count of public school closures between 2000 and 2013 and charter schools opened within walking distance of those schools 3 to 5 years prior to their closing. The 3- to 5-year lag accounts for the time that charters needed to takeoff in neighborhoods through recruitment and marketing, as well as establishing their reputation in the neighborhood and city. Figure 2 suggests that closures were preceded by increases in charter schools opened within walking distance. This is especially noticeable between 2002 and 2004, 2007 and 2009, and 2012 and 2013. The subsequent ebb in school closures, likewise, was preceded by an ebb in newly opened charter schools.Challenging the market logic of school choice: A spatial analysis of charter school expansion in ChicagoAll authorsStephanie Farmer, Chris D. Poulos & Ashley Baberhttps://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2018.1555437Published online:07 January 2019 Figure 2. Number of charter schools opened within 1.5 miles of a public school 3–5 years prior to its closure against the count of public school closures per year, 2000–2013, Chicago, Illinois. Display full size Figure 2. Number of charter schools opened within 1.5 miles of a public school 3–5 years prior to its closure against the count of public school closures per year, 2000–2013, Chicago, Illinois. Our second cut of the spatial allocation of charter schools examines the relationship between charter school locations and the population change in children under the age of 18. Figure 3 depicts the location of new charter schools opened between 2000 and 2015 in relation to the change in the under-18 population between 2000 and 2010. Of the 108 new charter schools, 85% were opened in areas that were experiencing some form of population loss for this age range and, more significant, 69% of those new charter schools were opened in areas with above-median population loss (over 20% of their under-18 population; see Table 1). Contrary to the consumer demand thesis, charter schools were more likely to expand in areas with significantly declining populations and therefore less “market” demand (i.e., students) for new schools.Challenging the market logic of school choice: A spatial analysis of charter school expansion in ChicagoAll authorsStephanie Farmer, Chris D. Poulos & Ashley Baberhttps://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2018.1555437Published online:07 January 2019 Figure 3. Charter schools opened after 2000 and change in under-18 population in the 2000s, Chicago, Illinois. Display full size Figure 3. Charter schools opened after 2000 and change in under-18 population in the 2000s, Chicago, Illinois. In many cases, when CPS closed neighborhood schools in areas with declining under-18 population, CPS would reopen that facility as a privatized charter school. Figure 4 displays the location of public school facilities that were closed and reopened as charter schools in areas with a decline in the under-18 population. Between 2000 and 2010, 24 closed public school facilities were converted into charter schools. Of those, 96% were in areas with some loss in under-18 population, and 75% were in areas with above median under-18 population loss.Challenging the market logic of school choice: A spatial analysis of charter school expansion in ChicagoAll authorsStephanie Farmer, Chris D. Poulos & Ashley Baberhttps://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2018.1555437Published online:07 January 2019 Figure 4. Closed schools reopened as charter schools in areas with under-18 population decline, Chicago, Illinois. Display full size Figure 4. Closed schools reopened as charter schools in areas with under-18 population decline, Chicago, Illinois. Utilization rates provide a final cut of the neighborhood dynamics shaping the spatiality of schools. Charter school expansion appears to have provided marginal relief in areas with overcrowded schools (Figure 5). Just over a third of charter schools were located within 1.5 miles of the 68 overcrowded schools and about one in five were within 0.75 miles.Challenging the market logic of school choice: A spatial analysis of charter school expansion in ChicagoAll authorsStephanie Farmer, Chris D. Poulos & Ashley Baberhttps://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2018.1555437Published online:07 January 2019 Figure 5. Spatial relationship between charter schools opened 2010–2015 and overcrowded schools, Chicago, Illinois. Display full size Figure 5. Spatial relationship between charter schools opened 2010–2015 and overcrowded schools, Chicago, Illinois. Figure 6 confirms a spatial pattern between CPS’s 2012–2013 utilization measurements and change in Chicago’s under-18 population from 2000 to 2010. Schools categorized as underutilized were clustered in census tracts that experienced above-median loss in the under-18 population. These neighborhoods contained the largest proportion of schools categorized as underutilized (218 out of 303 underutilized schools). An additional 63 underutilized schools were located in neighborhoods that saw a 0% to 20% loss in their under-18 population. Figure 6 also demonstrates that all of the 41 charter schools opened from 2010 to 2015 were located within an area that saw at least some loss in its under-18 population. Strikingly, 88% were located within areas that saw above-median loss in its under-18 population. Additionally, Figure 7 provides a demographic context to assess the uneven impact of underutilization by race and ethnicity. This map depicts the areas where Black, Latinx, and Asian student populations are spatially concentrated in the city of Chicago, with one dot representing 50 children. Our map is consistent with the findings that Chicago is one of the most racially segregated cities and urban school districts in the United States (Orfield, Kucsera, & Siegel-Hawley, 2012). A comparison of figures 6 and 7 provides visual confirmation that the location of underutilized schools overlaps with areas of the city with higher concentrations of Black children.Challenging the market logic of school choice: A spatial analysis of charter school expansion in ChicagoAll authorsStephanie Farmer, Chris D. Poulos & Ashley Baberhttps://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2018.1555437Published online:07 January 2019 Figure 6. Areas with under-18 population loss between 2000 and 2009 compared with the 2012–2013 school year utilization rates and charter school locations from 2010 to 2015. Display full size Figure 6. Areas with under-18 population loss between 2000 and 2009 compared with the 2012–2013 school year utilization rates and charter school locations from 2010 to 2015. Challenging the market logic of school choice: A spatial analysis of charter school expansion in ChicagoAll authorsStephanie Farmer, Chris D. Poulos & Ashley Baberhttps://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2018.1555437Published online:07 January 2019 Figure 7. Racial breakdown of under-15 population, 2010, Chicago, Illinois. Display full size Figure 7. Racial breakdown of under-15 population, 2010, Chicago, Illinois. Contrary to the consumer demand thesis, charter schools were less likely to open in areas with growing student demand, such as in overcrowded school districts. Comparing these results with charter school density in neighborhoods with declining population, our findings show that charter schools were more likely to be built in neighborhoods with declining population under the age of 18 than in neighborhoods experiencing increases in under-18 populations. Because the majority of overcrowded schools tend to be located in Latinx communities (comparing figures 5 and 7), the stress on financial resources produced by the proliferation of charter schools can undermine the district’s ability to relieve overcrowding in predominantly Latinx schools. Charter school proliferation and financial inefficiencies The literature on budgetary stress caused by charter schools has focused on the aggregate effect of charter school proliferation on districtwide and individual school budgets. Our analytic framework and findings add a spatial and political–economic dimension to this literature. We offer a lens able to capture some of the generative mechanisms and spatial consequences of charter induced budgetary stress. To begin with, our findings illustrate that competitive locational decisions overproduced charter schools in areas with declining demand. Future research could examine the extent to which CPS’s deficit has been exacerbated by the overproduction of charter schools. School financing sheds some light on the ways in which overproduction may contribute to this budgetary stress. Per pupil allocations covering charter facility expenses, especially in redundant locations and depopulating neighborhoods, and debt service payments for new facility constructions likely places stress on CPS’s general revenue fund and the state’s education resources. The 108 Chicago charter schools opened between 2000 and 2015 obtained facilities in a variety of ways: some were housed in previously closed school buildings, some rented spaces from CPS or other property managers, and some built new facilities or renovated existing buildings. New facilities construction or renovation tends to require large, upfront capital payments and is often debt financed. We used the limited publicly available data to capture a snapshot of debt financing trends in CPS’s charter schools. According to the Illinois State Board of Education audits in 2015, 18 charter networks and independent operators filed an audit, covering 77 out of 121 charter schools operating in Chicago in 2015, or 64% of all charter schools. Their combined outstanding debt totaled over $225 million. This debt is in addition to CPS’s outstanding $6 billion debt in 2015. Because Chicago charter schools receive a per pupil allocation for facility-related expenses from the CPS’s general revenue fund, charter debt service payments are made from the same fund that finances public school operations. Additionally, Chicago charter schools have been successful in externalizing the cost of new facility construction onto state and local governments by soliciting subsidies for new charter construction. School districts, municipalities, and state governments issue traditional general obligation bonds that are secured by taxes and other revenues of the government jurisdiction issuing the bond. The state of Illinois has been involved in 15 bond transactions issuing a total of $172 million for Chicago charter school construction (Berry, 2015). There is a political element shaping these financial decisions, as well. Well-connected charter school operators, like United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), a community-based organization and turn-out-the-Latinx-vote organ of the local Democratic machine, have been the most successful in obtaining subsidies in Illinois. UNO has been successful in leveraging its political clout with the Illinois General Assembly, which approved two grants totaling $135 million to help UNO build its schools. This occurred at the same time as the state cut over $200 million from its statewide public school allocation budget. The case is illustrative of the special interests and political strategies that accompany and contribute to the financial inefficiencies associated with the market model of education. Even when the state of Illinois adopted austerity measures constraining public school budgets, the state shouldered the cost of charter expansion for politically connected charter school interests. Moving on, the literature on charter school proliferation and budgetary stress highlights the lack of coordination between the mobility of students and resources. Districts cannot allocate resources at the same pace as student mobility, and fixed costs are not easily reallocated or removed from budgets. This has keen implications for charter proliferation in CPS. In Chicago, per pupil allocations for charter school facility-related and operational expenses (like maintenance, janitorial service, heating/air, parking lot maintenance, electricity, etc.) are taken out of the same CPS general revenue fund that finances public school operations budgets. CPS does not receive more revenue for each additional school that it adds to its system; rather, additional schools stretch CPS’s fixed and limited general fund revenues across a greater number of schools. In 2015, charter schools received $660 million from CPS, constituting 18% of the district’s general revenue fund, to educate 14% of CPS students. Our research demonstrated the spatial patterns of inequalities associated with these allocational inefficiencies. These spatial patterns bear uneven consequences of austerity associated with budgetary stress. As Bifulco and Reback (2014) noted, closing schools is the primary way to reduce fixed costs. In Chicago, these closings are spatially associated with charterization (see Figure 2) and have exacerbated the adverse effects of population loss. Analysis Though school choice education reformers promote market mimicry as the most efficient and effective means to deliver public education, our research shows that a competitive charter school market led to the overproduction of charter schools in neighborhoods with significantly declining population and, as a consequence, produced spatial and financial inefficiencies throughout the public school system. From the perspective of spatial efficiency, if a market model of education were to deliver efficiencies to the school system, we would expect to see that charter schools would be more likely to locate in areas with overcrowded schools (hence high demand for new school relief) and few, if any, to locate in neighborhoods where the under-18 population decline was greater than what was occurring generally throughout the city. Instead, our research shows that the opposite trend occurred in Chicago. Spatially, the competitive education market has led to the overproduction of charter schools in low-demand markets (neighborhoods with declining under-18 population and near public schools with declining enrollments) where supply is outstripping demand. Between 2000 and 2015, CPS expanded its school choice portfolio by 16% (accounting for the number of schools CPS closed) while the under-18 population shrunk over 19% throughout the district. Since 2012, the decline in the under-18 population has translated into a loss of over 32,000 students from CPS (Karp & Vevea, 2017). Of the 108 new charter schools opened between 2000 and 2015, 69% were opened in neighborhoods experiencing a substantial decline (20% or more) of its population under 18 in the 2000s. The overproduction of charter schools in neighborhoods of declining under-18 population can exacerbate low enrollment trends in proximate neighborhood public schools. Spatial proximity of new charter schools to neighborhood schools matters. Research shows that parents choose to keep their kids in schools near their homes due to safety concerns or because they value the opportunity to form a relationship with their child’s teacher. Parents are more likely to look at a map and proximity to home than test scores and other performance metrics when choosing a school (Burdick-Will et al., 2013; Rich & Jennings, 2015). In other words, parents favor nearby schools because of place-based factors. Because charter schools draw their student populations from the surrounding neighborhoods (Ertas & Roch, 2014), public schools are forced to compete for students in neighborhoods of declining population. Our findings show that there is a spatial relationship between the location of new charter school facilities opened between 2000 and 2015 and the schools CPS closed during that period. Eighty-five percent of the new charter schools were located within walking distance from a school later closed during the 2003–2009 Ren10 school reform period. Later, 71% of the 49 schools closed for low enrollments in 2013 were within walking distance of a charter school. Even after CPS closed schools in neighborhoods with high decline in the under-18 population, they continued to open new charter schools within walking distance of those very same schools and sometimes within the closed school facility. In the 24 cases where CPS allowed charter schools to occupy a closed school facility between 2000 and 2010, 55% of them opted for a school facility closed in a neighborhood with above-median loss in the under-18 population. On the other hand, relative to neighborhoods with declining population of children under 18, charter schools were less likely to open in neighborhoods with overcrowded schools. Just over a third of new charter schools were located within 1.5 miles of CPS’s 68 overcrowded schools and only one in five were located within 0.75 miles. Overcrowded conditions have their own destabilizing effect on schools and can be detrimental for children’s learning environment. Overcrowded classrooms can be claustrophobic and noisy. Teachers often lack sufficient time to provide one-on-one instruction for each student. The adverse effects of overcrowding are validated by research that has found a number of benefits associated with class size reduction, including improved academic outcomes, narrowed racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, and increased likelihood of attending college at age 20 (Baker, Farrie, & Sciarra, 2016; Chetty et al., 2010; Chingos & Whitehurst, 2011). To relieve overcrowding in schools, CPS schools often resort to measures such as holding classes in hallways, closets, and even staircases. Historically, when parents, teachers, and principals complained to CPS about the overcrowded conditions, they were often told that the district lacks the money to pay for new teachers to reduce the number of kids per classroom or to build new schools and/or annexes to create more space for everyone. CPS’s resource scarcity inhibiting relief in overcrowded schools can be partially attributed to the cost of adding too many schools in areas with a shrinking student population that stresses CPS’s fiscal resources for additional teachers and facility construction projects in other parts of its system. The obstacles confronted by schools to achieve relief from overcrowding illustrates how spatial inefficiencies contribute to systemic financial inefficiencies. From a business market point of view, a firm is financially efficient when it invests its money in ways that maximize return on its investment (such as getting the same output from fewer resources by adopting advanced technology) and by limiting its borrowing needs. Financial efficiency gained under the market model of education is analogous to the business market insofar as the school system invests its scarce revenues to most effectively allocate its education resources: dollars for buildings, teachers and staff, and classroom essentials. By overproducing new charter schools in areas with significant decline in student-age population and near existing public schools, CPS did not allocate its scarce revenues in a financially efficient way. Arguably, if charter schools delivered a better education product than neighborhood public schools, then investing in new charter schools would be a more financially efficient means to allocate education resources. However, as numerous studies show (see Center for Research on Education Outcome, 2009, 2013; Golab, Schlikerman, & FitzPatrick, 2014; Zimmer et al., 2009), the majority of CPS charter schools do not outperform neighborhood public schools with similar student populations and neighborhood environments. In many cases, they underperform neighborhood public schools. If CPS is not getting a better, more effective education product for its investment, then it stands to reason that adding more charter schools in areas of declining population is not a financially efficient strategy. Spatial inefficiencies produced by the overproduction of charter schools saturating neighborhoods with population loss generate financial inefficiencies insofar as public tax dollars pay for charter school facility-related expenses. Our preliminary findings indicate future pathways for research into the fiscal effects of charter school growth strategies on school district finances that can augment three trends in the research. First, researchers are examining how charter school expansion impacts public school operations budgets by creating redundant administrative bodies and schools and through the generation of negative externalities (Baker, 2016; Ladd & Singleton, 2017). Future research can examine the ways in which per pupil allocations for inefficiently placed charter school facilities can overtax school operations revenues in troubled urban school districts. Second, researchers are examining how competitive education reforms lead to inefficient allocations of capital revenues. Cook (2016) explored the ways in which charter school competition encourages public schools to make capital investments in buildings as a way to lure parents and students to enhanced facilities. Jabbar (2015) finds that charter school operators readily acknowledge that investments in facility upgrades attract demand but stops short of exploring the fiscal impacts of new charter facility investments on public school budgets. Future research can delve more deeply into the ways charter school capital investments can impact public school financial stability in relation to the magnitude of debt and debt service payments that school districts hold on their books. We think that there is fruitful opportunity for researchers to delve more into the inefficient allocation of revenues used to finance new competitive school facilities in spatially inefficient locations. What is the fiscal impact of adding new schools in areas with declining population and with existing schools that have inflexible fixed costs? These spatial and financial inefficiencies present a challenge to claims that market competition is an efficient way to deliver quality education and begs the question, why do charter schools in Chicago tend to open in low-demand markets (or neighborhoods)? Though it is beyond the scope of our research project to affirmatively state why charter schools are more likely to open in low-demand markets versus higher demand markets, we offer two explanations that warrant future research: political expediency and the firm-like behavior of charter schools. We agree with scholars like Lipman (2011) and Green, Baker, Oluwole, and Mead (2015) that charter schools get a foothold in the education market by locating in depopulating Black communities due to political activities of two distinct, and sometimes overlapping, groups: well-intentioned school reformers seeking education equity in Black neighborhoods and elite market education reformers who have an interest in opening charters schools in politically expedient neighborhoods where parents would be more receptive (and less politically resistant) to marketized charter schools. Many well-intentioned charter school supporters believe that a market model of education will bring more resources and focus to education in Black and Latinx communities, framing school choice as a civil rights issue. State failure to deliver quality public schools in racially and economically segregated urban areas, exacerbated by government spending cutbacks and fiscal austerity, gives the appearance that charter schools are the only alternative to bringing new resources into the community (even though their revenue source is public school tax revenues), generating strong parental and community support for charter schools in Black communities (Green et al., 2015; Lipman, 2011). This perception is reinforced by a massive public relations campaign targeted in Black neighborhoods championing the superiority of marketized charter schools over public schools led by elite philanthropic foundations and AstroTurf pro-charter community organizations (Jabbar, 2015; Lubienski, 2005). Elites who support market education reforms, whether through philanthropic foundations, political projects, or direct support for select charter school networks, have been able to accomplish market education in part by appealing to the desires for quality education of vulnerable low-income and working-class people of color. However, we believe that the political expediency argument is incomplete. We take charter schools at their word that they are adopting competitive, business-like practices to deliver an educational product that appeals to consumer demand. As Marx (1976) observed in Capital: Volume 1, the logic of competitive markets generates its own contradictions. Charter schools are no exception. The individual interest of firms creates a contradiction whereby in the short term charter schools have an incentive to expand, whereas in the long term, charter school expansion leads to the supply of schools outstripping student demand and can undermine the fiscal stability of school districts. In other words, though individual charter school firms have an interest to enter a market and grow their market share, when numerous charter firms pursue their own individual interests, the aggregate effect can lead to the overproduction of schools (Harvey, 1989). The aggregate effect of individual charter firm behavior, pursuing their self-interest in politically expedient locations disconnected from the needs of the system as a whole, generated spatial (school overbuild, saturation, and redundancy) and financial (austerity budgets stretched across an oversupply of schools) inefficiencies in the Chicago school system as a whole. These contradictions were exacerbated in Chicago by corporate school reform policies that decentralize government decision-making processes to the level of the firm (charter operators and networks) versus the level of the centralized school district (the public schools agency), thus giving nonstate actors the ability to make locational and financial decisions in ways that are disconnected from the school system as a whole (Baker, 2016; Teresa & Good, 2017). Charter operators and networks have relative autonomy from district planning processes and can propose new school locations independent of CPS priorities. When charter school operators and networks propose new schools to the Chicago Board of Education for approval of the charter contract, they do not have to specify the address of the school but rather a general location where they would like to place a school. There is no citywide school facilities master plan that determines where the most need is for new charters. Chicago’s lax charter school regulation enabled charter firms to successfully open schools in locations that may not be optimal for the CPS system as a whole but may have been beneficial for the short-term interest of the individual charter firm to enter into the market and expand their market presence. The contradictions generated by the growth logic of charter firms are grounded in specific and concrete spaces and built environments. Schools are not aspatial, inert containers of social relations. The spatiality of schools is themselves a social configuration shaped by socioeconomic and racial relations and forces. Schools are also spatially fixed, capital-intensive projects tied to the dynamics and flows of private- and public-sector capital and debt in the built environment. Decisions pertaining to the new construction, closing, and repurposing of schools carry long-term and deep-rooted consequences for neighborhoods, subsequent school policy, and school finances. Competitive education policy reforms can conflict with the technical features of fixed school infrastructures. Spatial fixity operates in a temporality that is incongruous with the short-term competitive and finance growth logic, which produces antagonisms associated with the locational decisions of these other dimensions. The spatial dynamics of charter expansion lock schools in place, and the locational decisions of charter schools operate in the abstract, aspatial logic of markets and short-term decision making. Hence, the growth logic of charter school marketization is disconnected from place-based dynamics and, most important, from the spatialized outcomes of neoliberal austerity. The implementation of neoliberal education policy interacts with the spatialized and systemic features of institutionalized racism that have been constructed in ways that exclude, segregate, or deprive equal opportunity to communities of color (Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Omi & Winant, 1994). Institutional racism is not a static feature of the social structure but is actively remade and transformed through all sorts of social policy arrangements and forces, including public education reform centered on disruptive school choice market competition. As our research showed, the overproduction of charter schools and resulting financial strain went on to produce disruptive cycles of public school closures overwhelmingly taking place in Black schools and neighborhoods. At the same time CPS was engaged in a disruptive market reform of CPS schools, other neoliberal economic and state restructuring forces were undermining the viability of Black neighborhoods and life chances. The social abandonment of Black communities signaled by cuts to the public sector (i.e., public housing and school closures), the decline of middle-income industrial and public-sector jobs and the concomitant rise of precarious working-poor labor markets, predatory real estate practices causing foreclosures and vacancies, displacement caused by gentrification and growing unaffordability in the housing market, and seemingly intractable crime coupled, with racially motivated policing form the socioracial spatialized neoliberal context that has pushed Black families out from Chicago. Approximately 250,000 Black people moved out of Chicago between 2000 and 2016. Many movers cite the city’s disruptive school choice system as a reason why they transfer their child to Chicago’s stable suburban school districts, resulting in a loss of more than 52,000 Black students in the CPS system (Belsha, 2017). Neoliberal state and economic restructuring has deepened deprivation and precariousness in Black neighborhoods and is one among a panoply of forces reconstituting racial segregation and institutionalized forms of racial oppression. As low-income Black communities are being transformed into precarious neighborhoods by capital and social abandonment, schools are often the one remaining social institution anchored to the community. The taken-for-granted role of urban public schools as community anchors providing residents with a sense of identity, connection, and resources is undermined by a school system where closures are prefigured. Prefigured school closures due to competitive market forces, including charter firm behavior, create one more layer of insecurity and precariousness impacting Black communities. The unintended consequences of disruptive school choice policies coupled with a punitive neoliberal socio-racial spatial context will produce new contradictions for Chicago’s charter school market. As education insecurity continues to push people out of the city, demand for spatially fixed, and in some cases indebted, charter schools that are strongly concentrated in distressed Black neighborhoods will decline. Shrinking demand for an oversupply of charter schools will generate further instability within the charter school market, because they will struggle for per pupil allocations to pay back their debt and keep their doors open. Future research should explore how spatial and fiscal inefficiencies impact the likelihood that charter schools, operating in a competitive schools market, may close due to low enrollments or lack of adequate fiscal support. Future research could also benefit from a regression analysis investigating the statistical relationship between population decline, school closures, and charter school locations. Conclusion Our research pushes back on some basic assumptions of the market-oriented education reform project adopted by CPS and many other urban public school districts. For over 20 years in Chicago, school choice, carried out in large part through charterization, has been promoted as a means of obviating problems with the irrationalities and inefficiencies of the public schools system. Increased competition between schools and private-sector management has been championed as a market solution to so-called public-sector inefficiency (Dempster, 2013). Our research complicates this simplistic perspective, revealing new patterns of inefficiencies produced by market-based approaches to schools. We provide three lessons for policymakers and school decision-making authorities. First, policymakers need to understand how the individual interests of charter schools, operating as business firms, to grow and expand do not always produce what is efficient or sustainable for the school system as a whole. Rather than ironing out inefficiencies, CPS’s market-oriented approach has introduced new forms of inefficiencies to the school district by decentralizing the process of school planning to individual charter firms. If CPS continues to license charter schools, it needs to enhance their regulation of the charter business sector to stop the overproduction of charter schools. Further, the licensing process should be connected to a school facilities planning process. The lack of an overarching, centralized planning process is one of the reasons why redundant charter schools have saturated neighborhoods with declining under-18 populations. In addition, CPS needs to establish more oversight and transparency mechanisms to ensure that charter schools are not wasting scarce taxpayer dollars by building in low-demand areas and to allow the public to understand the magnitude of debt that the public is paying back through charter school per pupil allocations. Second, policymakers should consider how the overproduction of charter schools contributes to the school agency’s budgetary stress. Though official rationales for CPS cuts and closures blame insufficient state funding and excessively compensated Chicago Teachers Union members, officials do not reflect on the impact of new charter school proliferation on the fiscal health of the public school district. Instead of introducing regulatory mechanisms to make the charter location process more rational, city hall and CPS respond to CPS’s strained budget resources by disciplining and shrinking inefficient public schools. Third, policymakers need to consider the ways in which public-sector austerity and the marketization of schools interact with the sociospatial dynamics of neighborhoods and can deepen patterns of racial inequality. Instead of stemming the tide, the marketized solutions to deliver high-quality education in an era of austerity act as further breaking points for the public school system as a whole, leading to deepening instability and insecurity in distressed neighborhoods and increasing racial and class-based inequalities. Table 1. Charter schools opened within 1.5 and 0.75 miles of a closed school, 2000–2015, Chicago, Illinois.a  2000–2004, n (%)2005–2009, n (%)2010–2015, n (%)Total, n (%)Closed school28 (22.4)46 (36.8)51 (40.8)125Charter school opened13 (12)54 (50)41 (38)108Charter opened within 1.5 miles8 (7.4)49 (45.4)28 (25.9)85 (78.7)Charter opened within 0.75 miles7 (6.5)34 (31.5)19 (17.6)60 (55.6) Note. aPercentages for charter schools opened within 1.5 and 0.75 miles of closed school locations are shown as the percentage of all charter schools opened between 2000 and 2015. Notes 1. Chicago charter schools are restricted to nonprofit operators in regular K-12 programs. Nonprofit contract schools tend to operate Chicago’s alternative high schools, established for students returning to school after dropping out or being expelled for various reasons. References Akers, J. M. (2012). Separate and unequal: The consumption of public education in post-Katrina New Orleans. 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Her published research focuses on the financialization of urban infrastructure and the impact of public school reform on school facilities. Chris D. Poulos Chris D. Poulos is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His current research examines the role of local state infrastructure projects in shaping real estate markets and contributing to overbuilding crises. Ashley Baber Ashley Baber is a PhD student in sociology at Loyola University in Chicago. Her current research examines contingent labor and broader processes contributing to labor market precarity. FundingThis work was supported by the Roosevelt University (Summer Research Grant).