There goes the neighborhood school.

• Author: Berkshire, Jennifer C.

When the city of Chicago shuttered some fifty neighborhood schools last year, officials used antiseptic-sounding words like "underperformance" and "underutilization."But visit neighborhoods that bore the brunt of the closings, as I did recently, and you'll hear that the battle over the city's schools is about something much larger: the future of the city itself and who gets to live here.

Parents, teachers and community leaders told me that the replacement of neighborhood schools serving the city's poorest children with privately run charters that don't, can't be separated from the relentless gentrification that's rapidly transforming Chicago into a wealthier, whiter city. Think urban renewal but without the bulldozers.

Take the El down from O'Hare and Chicago's remaking is hard to ignore. Cranes dot the skyline, and as the train snakes its way through Bucktown, a formerly Polish working class neighborhood turned trendy and expensive, you pass close enough to see what looks to be the very last tenement, being demolished brick by brick. Farther down the Blue Line, what Mayor Rahm Emanuel is fond of calling the "New Chicago" really comes into view. We're on the Near North Side now, formerly the site of the notorious Cabrini-Green housing project that, at its peak, housed 15,000 residents, most in vast towers. The neighborhood now boasts a Whole Foods, complete with a wine bar, as well as an exclusive private school: the British School of Chicago, a modern structure graced with images of smiling white students gazing toward where Cabrini's towers once loomed. And had community opposition not ruled the day, this site would also have been home to Chicago's newest selective enrollment high school, Barack Obama College Prep.

As for the Cabrini residents who called this neighborhood home until 2011, their whereabouts constitutes one of the great mysteries of New Chicago. What is beyond dispute is this: According to census data, Chicago has lost 200,000 of its African American residents over the past decade.

"The city is squeezing us out," says South Side education organizer Jitu Brown. And like so many activists I spoke to, Brown views the closure of schools as an effort to replace Chicago's poor, minority residents with wealthier inhabitants. "When you shut down a neighborhood school, you send a powerful signal to the people who've been living there: 'This neighborhood isn't for you.' "

While the pace of Chicago's gentrification is unmistakable on the Near North Side, it can be harder to...