Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Earth & Environmental Sciences
Advisor
Cindi Katz
Committee Members
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Michelle Fine
Subject Categories
Human Geography | Other Education
Keywords
co-location, critical childhood studies, social reproduction, racial capitalism, charter schools, educational policy
Abstract
In New York City, the majority of public schools are co-located—or sited in the same building—with another school. Yet scholarship on co-location has been limited, and existing policy studies have primarily focused on quantitative measures such as test scores and crowding. This dissertation offers a geographic analysis of co-location policy using qualitative and archival research methods. I consider drivers, experiences, and effects of co-location across and between scales, asking what co-location reflects, produces, and reproduces.
Following an initial review of the literature, the second chapter of this study presents a history of co-location policy, its implementation, and contestation in New York City. I trace the emergence of co-location as policy (from precedents to initial “incubation” of charters to widespread practice), demonstrating that public school building partition has served as a spatial fix enabling charter school proliferation, and that public school space came to be understood as real estate through this process. The public school losses with co-location are material, spatial, and personal; they also echo processes of gentrification. I argue that, because co-location has made the movement of public resources into charter schools obvious and tangible for many New York City parents and teachers, the policy has facilitated the sustained public attention to and contestation of this giveaway of public resources to charter schools.
Three ethnographic chapters of the study examine the spatial dynamics of co-location in a school building where a progressive, intentionally-diverse charter school is sited within a longstanding historically-Black neighborhood public school zoned solely for adjacent public housing. I draw on a semester of participant observation in the zoned public elementary school, mapmaking activities with children from both schools, child-led tours of the building with public school students, group and individual interviews with parents and teachers in both schools, and individual interviews with school administrators in the public school. I offer reflections on my engagement with Nancy Mandell’s “Least-Adult Role in Studying Children” in my field work.
At the neighborhood level, I found co-located schools to be situated within uneven urban geographies and a landscape of “school choice.” Different orientations to the co-located schools underscored different geographic relationships to “community.” For white professional charter school parents, co-location offered a resolution to the contradictions of home ownership and schooling in a gentrifying neighborhood, literally making space for a school that fit their desires. Public school parents made ongoing enrollment decisions that complicated the assumptions and premises of school choice, arriving at the school through limitations on their participation in the school “marketplace” but also drawn by tangible acts of care in the public school that signified literal and figurative closeness to home. The partitioning of the school building reinforced the partitioned geographies of the surrounding neighborhood; at the doors of the building, interactions between security and between parents in different schools reinscribed affinities and differentiation, and shaped perceptions of school choice.
Co-location is an ongoing process, navigated in the daily life of staff and teachers in the building. Tensions from early struggles over charter siting and expansion echoed in the building a decade later, as teachers described tense interactions between the schools, and a sense of “colonization.” Ongoing management required by the public school office underscored the ways that co-location is not a one-time giveaway of space, but an ongoing relationship of dispossession.
For children, co-location had material effects shaping their physical realities—late lunches, gym class held in alternate locations, crowded stairwells. They noticed disparities: public school children worked to understand why and how the schools had different demographics and resources, developing theories hinging on whiteness, special talents, and special needs. Charter school students expressed developing liberal subjectivities and spoke of the public school with pity as a place they would never want to attend. I theorize co-location as not only a form of group differentiation but also as pedagogical: a site of dynamic, instructional, and experiential learning in which children tested out perspectives and developed theories.
Rather than a neutral administrative practice, co-location both reproduces and teaches children (and adults) about value, deservingness, and racial capitalist mechanisms of difference. Co-location has served to deplete resources from already under-resourced schools, further illuminating how choice policy alone won’t “fix” schools. Even beyond the stresses and tensions of the early years of siting struggle, the proximity and partitions in the co-located building lay bare the lines of access, money, class, race, and futures. This dissertation demonstrates how co-location policy is spatial reorganization in service of the marketization of schooling, a spatial manifestation of school choice that limits the terrain of public struggle, serves as a form of accumulation by dispossession, and shapes lived experiences.
Recommended Citation
Loomis, Caroline, "Proximity and Partition: Geographies of Childhood, Choice, and Co-Location in New York City Schools" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6347
