Charterization, Gentrification, and the Geography of Opening and Closing Schools in Washington, DC

In the late-2000s, Washington, DC achieved national notoriety for its embrace of market accountability in public schools and support for a steadily expanding charter sector. At the same time, the DC government pursued a concerted effort to attract new residents and investment to the city, a project that bore fruit in the form of some of the highest levels of gentrification in the country. Most of the research exploring intersections between charterization and gentrification has focused on the school choice decisions of gentrifier parents and school enrollment patterns. This paper illuminates the geography of opening and closing schools in DC—both charter and District-operated—between 1997 and 2017 and describes the intersection of those processes with patterns of gentrification and neighborhood change across the city. A detailed description of how this played out in one gentrifying neighborhood supplements the citywide analysis.