If LAUSD must consolidate schools, it should also integrate them

Los Angeles Unified has seen enrollment decline by hundreds of thousands of students since its school populations peaked more than two decades ago. Now the district is preparing to make consequential decisions about which schools will remain open, which will consolidate and where students will go. Those choices could deepen long-standing inequities — or become a rare opportunity to build a more integrated school system.

The pressures are real: falling birthrates, lack of affordable housing, migration, immigration enforcement and competition from private and charter schools have all contributed to the declining enrollment. LAUSD has managed the leadership transition from Alberto Carvalho to Andrés Chait with relative ease, while reporting gains in student test scores across the last five years. But shrinking enrollment will probably bring school closures, consolidations and layoffs. The question is: Can the district continue to improve while it’s shrinking?

LAUSD has started to host regular listening sessions and solicit community input. These forums are necessary, but listening alone will not ensure that equitable decisions are made. As district officials navigate difficult conversations with teachers, staff, parents and community members, they should keep in mind that the most common solutions to declining enrollment are not always the most effective. School closures must produce genuine savings, minimize disruptions, and reduce racial and economic isolation.

Decades of research show why these guardrails matter. School closures are politically unpopular and have provoked fierce community resistance, including hunger strikes. School closures are also not neutral: In many cities, closures disproportionately affect Black and Latino students and can exacerbate geographic inequality in educational access. Students lose connections with teachers and peers at an age when they need stability the most.

The damage can extend beyond enrolled students. Schools are embedded in neighborhood ecosystems. Their loss affects families, alumni and former staff, producing what scholars call “institutional mourning.” People grieve the loss of schools the way they do people, and school closures can lead to neighborhood blight.

For an equity-focused district, the first question should therefore be whether closure is truly necessary. The second question should ask how to prevent consolidations from inflicting harms. And the third should explore how to seize the opportunity to rethink school attendance zones in ways that further equity goals.

The standard argument for school closures is financial: Fewer campuses should mean lower costs. Yet research shows that, at least in California, school closures do not necessarily improve district finances. Savings can be offset by the costs of receiving more students, providing transition support and transporting children farther from home.

California law requires districts to consider operating costs and savings, yet closure plans often focus only on the immediate savings while overlooking longer-term costs. Before closing a school, LAUSD must consider both the short- and medium-term costs and benefits, and ensure that closures or consolidations do, in fact, lead to savings.

Some consolidation may be unavoidable. In these cases, LAUSD should treat attendance boundaries and assignments as tools for integration. Racist housing and mortgage-lending practices helped produce today’s segregated neighborhoods and schools. In Los Angeles, attendance zones have helped reserve some of the best-resourced schools for affluent children, while segregation perpetuates disparities in academic outcomes. There is strong evidence that desegregation improves student outcomes at a scale few other policies match.

Every consolidation proposal should include a racial and socioeconomic impact analysis comparing alternative scenarios. The board should then favor mergers and boundary changes that increase integration, guarantee displaced students access to well-resourced schools and provide transportation. Such plans may face resistance, particularly from families accustomed to privileged access, but examples in Brooklyn District 13 in New York and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina show that school mergers can boost integration, and research consistently documents the broad benefits of desegregation.

In Brooklyn, leaders merged an underenrolled elementary school serving mostly Black and low-income students with a more affluent and racially diverse school that needed additional space. A working group with equal representation from both communities developed a shared vision for the new school, including a temporary co-principalship.

In Charlotte-Mecklenburg, overcrowded majority-white schools were paired with nearby underenrolled majority-Black schools. The campuses stayed open but were split between lower and upper grades to foster integration. These efforts also require ongoing oversight to ensure that bringing students together leads to true integration within classrooms and programming.

Back in California, LAUSD at the very least should revise its Choices application, the unified application process for public schools, magnet schools, multilingual schools and affiliated charter schools, so that displaced low-income students receive priority in subsequent enrollment cycles. A child should not lose a neighborhood school only to be shut out of L.A.’s most desirable and best-resourced campuses.

LAUSD has a chance to model equity-centered “rightsizing”: decisions that weigh real savings against human costs, honor the histories of affected communities and expand opportunity for students long denied it. LAUSD can leverage this extraordinarily difficult moment to right past wrongs and create a stronger, more integrated school system.

Huriya Jabbar is a professor of education at the University of Southern California and Alvin Makori is a PhD candidate in education at the University of Southern California.