The book examines previously unexplored implications of two dramatic shifts in the urban educational landscape. The first shift is the rapid disappearance of Catholic schools from urban neighborhoods. The second shift is the rise of “charter schools”—public schools that are privately operated and freed from some state education regulations. Although a great deal is known about how Catholic schools and charter schools function as educational institutions, virtually nothing is known about how they perform as community institutions. This question is at the heart of the book. Drawing primarily upo ... More

The book examines previously unexplored implications of two dramatic shifts in the urban educational landscape. The first shift is the rapid disappearance of Catholic schools from urban neighborhoods. The second shift is the rise of “charter schools”—public schools that are privately operated and freed from some state education regulations. Although a great deal is known about how Catholic schools and charter schools function as educational institutions, virtually nothing is known about how they perform as community institutions. This question is at the heart of the book. Drawing primarily upon two sources of data—social-capital data collected by the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and crime data collected at the police-beat level, the book explore the effects of Catholic school closures—and, to a lesser extent, charter school openings—on urban neighborhoods in Chicago. The book replicates this study with analogous data in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. The findings are sobering. They suggest that Catholic schools are important neighborhood institutions and that their closures trigger disorder and crime and suppress social capital in urban neighborhoods. Moreover, the findings suggest that charter schools do not appear to mitigate these effects. The findings portend serious consequences for urban neighborhoods that lose Catholic schools—consequences with important implications for debates about both education and policing policy. In particular, these findings bolster the contested case for school choice efforts that enable students of modest means to spend public funds at private schools.