The Philadelphia School Board voted in May 2026 to close 17 of its 218 schools. Seven are elementary schools, five are middle schools and five are high schools. Additionally, three other high schools will move into existing schools and share buildings.
I am an educational anthropologist and co-author of “Schools for Sale,” a forthcoming book that examines what happened during Philly’s last wave of mass school closures, when the district closed 30 of its 249 public schools between June 2012 and June 2013.
My co-authors and I are often asked by citizens, academics and stakeholders whether the School District of Philadelphia’s stated goals for closures – cost savings and reinvestment in existing schools – are achievable. People also want to know whether the current planned closures are similar to or different from 2013.
Shot of large beige building in foreground with glass skyscrapers in background
The Philadelphia School District plans to close 17 schools over the next year to help address its $300 million budget shortfall. Local schools and communities say they’ve been left out of the planning process. AP Photo/Matt Rourke
The wave of public school closures 13 years ago in Philadelphia also swept other major American cities, including Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. These cities, like Philadelphia, decided to close traditional neighborhood schools in order to consolidate underused buildings as the number of students enrolled in their districts dwindled.
In 2013, Philadelphia’s public schools were grappling with roughly 70,000 empty seats, in a district designed for 195,000 students.
This was the cumulative result of a decade of federal and state policies, including No Child Left Behind, passed in 2001, and Race to the Top, in 2009. Both policies tied school funding to standardized test performance, meaning that schools that failed to meet testing benchmarks were recommended for closure and charter conversion. These policies fueled rapid charter school expansion in Philadelphia and nationally.
Between 1999 and 2014, approximately 80 charter schools opened in the city. The share of Philadelphia students enrolled in charters leaped from 2% to 36%, and funding to support them followed the same path.
At the same time, the district faced mounting financial pressures after federal stimulus funds that the city received following the 2008 recession expired. Meanwhile, the costs of maintaining a parallel charter sector continued to grow.
A state law passed in 1997 requires all Pennsylvania districts to remit 70% of per-pupil funding to the charter each child attends instead of a public school. This drove up payments to charter schools by more than 3,000% from 1999 to 2014 and diverted funds away from district schools that still needed to maintain fixed costs, such as utilities, staffing and building improvements.
By early 2012, the district faced a US$300 million budget deficit. The district laid off more than 300 teachers and support staff the following year.
The district hired large consulting firms from out of state in 2010 and again in 2012 to evaluate which schools would meet the criteria for closure. The consultants considered building quality, building use and academic performance.
They even created a way to measure school safety based on suspensions and violent incidents. One thing they didn’t do was visit the schools or communities. Ultimately, they listed 60 potential schools for closure.
This number narrowed to 30 after rounds of community meetings and a vote by the School Reform Commission, which at the time was a partially state-appointed, partially mayoral-appointed board.
Six public schools shuttered in June 2012 and another 24 in June 2013. The closures displaced nearly 10,000 students. Many went on to a new public school assigned to them; others went to charters or left the district altogether.
Now, Philadelphia – along with other cities, including Baltimore, St. Louis, Houston and Atlanta – is planning a new wave of school closures.
As in 2013, officials cite underutilized space and the goal of redirecting savings from closures into long-deferred capital improvements for the district’s aging facilities. The average school building in Philadelphia is 75 years old.
Declining enrollment – there are approximately 20,000 fewer students in district-run schools than a decade ago – drives these vacancies, but the underlying dynamics of enrollment have also shifted.
Enrollment at in-person charter schools remains stable, having increased just 3% between 2017 and 2022. However, enrollment at cyber charter schools, where students attend classes virtually, more than doubled over the same period, thanks in part to the pandemic. Cyber charters now serve about 13,400 students districtwide.
A decline in enrollment at Philadelphia public schools reflects broader national trends. These include smaller kindergarten cohorts, declining birth rates, more people moving out of cities post-pandemic and recent federal immigration restrictions that have reduced the number of immigrant children enrolling in public schools nationwide.
In 2013, The School District of Philadelphia projected $28 million in cost savings from its closure plan. However, a report released later that year from the city controller predicted that the projected savings were overstated in the 2012 facilities plan and, in practice, did not materialize.
The report pointed to underestimated costs associated with students moving to new schools, the ongoing expenses of maintaining vacant properties and the relatively modest scale of the projected $28 million savings in the context of a roughly $300 million annual deficit.
Attendance rates and academic performance dropped both for students who transitioned from closed schools as well as for students at the receiving schools.
After the 30 schools closed, there was not a long-term facilities planning process to meaningfully invest in the school buildings that remained open. This lack of planning exacerbated many of the very conditions the current plan now seeks to address, a reflection of both lack of funds to maintain schools but also a lack of process by district facilities’ managers to meaningfully address building conditions after the 2013 closures.
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