!P.D.F D.o.w.n.l.o.a.d Ghosts in the Schoolyard:

“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain <i>bad</i> schools.”<br />  <br /> That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens <i>Ghosts in the Schoolyard</i>: 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.<br />  <br /> 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.<br />  <br /> 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 who