Commentary: The prosaic reasons behind school closures

Memo to the Oregon Legislature: The increasingly raucous battle over plans for public schools — mainly elementaries — in the Portland School District makes for a good reason for never making school district elections partisan. The realities of this debate are intensely practical.

School boards in only five states (Louisiana, Alabama, Pennsylvania and Connecticut) generally are elected by political party; five other states allow a location option.

This hasn’t stopped activists in Portland from linking proposals for school closures or cuts to national partisan political trends.

In Portland, school administrators earlier this month released two options for mass changes to schools, including boundary changes, course offerings, outright closures and more. The school board is expected to choose between them, or decide on alternatives, at a final vote in December.

The district now has 81 schools. The changes could affect most of them in some way, and one option calls for closure of 13 elementary and one middle school.

The district may not have helped itself by calling the effort “rightsizing,” a term many private corporations have used to signal mass cutbacks and layoffs.

This being Portland, protests were quick to arise. Some of that has approached the highly partisan and almost conspiratorial. A teacher union group called Rank-and-File Educators for Democracy (a caucus of the Oregon Education Association) posted one article about “How privatizers are planning to close PPS schools and hasten the dismantling of public education in our city.”

An Instagram reel from the group linked the proposed changes to Chiefs for Change, which provides training for school administrators and of which Portland Superintendent Kimberlle Arnstrong is in a leadership position. Chiefs, founded in Florida by former Governor Jeb Bush, has been described as conservative and Republican, but the group has moved in a very different direction in the last decade.

Searching in such places for explanations for the school reductions may feel satisfying for some activists, but the real reasons lie in more hard-to-handle directions.

School closures are a national phenomenon, affecting mainly larger-population school districts (though many smaller ones too) all over the country.

Student population in public schools peaked around 2019 and has decreased by about a third since then. Enrollment sank most deeply during the pandemic years, but has not returned to its earlier numbers since. In the 2025-26 school year, districts nationally closed more than 1,000 schools.

The reasons are many, and some seem immune to simple policy changes. Families have gotten smaller in recent years, a trend predating the Covid pandemic. In many places enrollment has grown for private and charter schools. In some places, students have simply vanished from tracking, because they’re attending new-style micro-schools off the grid, or in some cases because of recent immigration enforcement.

One analyst of school reductions also points to high housing costs, which is discouraging local residence by young families in many larger and mid-sized population areas.

Schools in major metro areas like Philadelphia, Seattle and Houston have been closed or merged. So, counter-intuitively, have schools in areas where the overall population is fast-growing, such as the Boise, Idaho, metro area. (There, a proposal for closure of another elementary school surfaced this week.) In Georgia, Atlanta Public Schools has building space for about 70,000 students, but has only about 50,000 actual students.

None of this is popular, and certainly not in Portland. There, one commenter on a Portland School District Facebook page called out: “Pause the process! This is all way too fast with no sound evidence or proper planning.”

Another said, “Is there ANYONE who actually has a child in the PPS system that thinks these scenarios are a good idea? Because I sure haven’t heard any positive commentary from anyone. No one has been able to provide concrete examples of how this will positively affect our kids, or our teachers.”

Most of the commentary is likely to be negative, as it has been in most places around the country which have been going through a similar process. People dislike having to send children further away to school, and long-standing school traditions and memories are being disrupted. Transitions to other schools, and in some cases possibly larger classes, will not be welcomed either.

The district might help itself with an extensive outreach program over the next couple of months, before the planned board vote. It might even consider postponing the vote until district officials and the parents,teachers and others there have had a larger chance to discuss the changes.

And after all, the reasons often come down to the financial. Good community uses may be made of the old school structures. The greater efficiency probably does come from teaching 500 students in a building made for 700. But if – if – patrons want to pay the extra charge (taxes, that is), maybe that’s their proper choice. But before that conversation can be had, all the facts have to be laid out.

Sounds more like a job for practical compromisers than it does partisan politics.