Here’s on op-ed on what school closings really mean to neighborhoods, by Elaine Simon, Co-Director of the Urban Studies Program. She has studied and written about Philadelphia school reform for almost three decades and for the last six years taught a project-based learning course, “Schools and Community Development,” in collaboration with teachers at Penn and in West Philadelphia high schools. The op-ed originally appeared in the Philadelphia Public School Notebook (www.thenotebook.org), a nonprofit watchdog news organization that has covered the school system since 1994, and here we have re-posted it from The Washington Post.