ABSTRACT
School closures have become a defining feature of educational restructuring in rural America, yet little is known about how closure risks have been distributed across schools with different racial compositions over time. Using national administrative data covering more than 96,000 public schools from 1987 to 2024, this study examines how racial composition shaped the institutional survival of rural schools during a period of population decline and policy retrenchment. Drawing on discrete-time hazard models, I show that the relationship between White enrollment proportion and closure risk is nonlinear: schools at both ends of the racial composition distribution face lower closure odds than those in the moderate integration range, a pattern consistent with the argument that racially mixed schools occupy the most institutionally precarious position in a political economy shaped by White disinvestment from integrated public institutions. In the rural South, this gradient shifts toward lower levels of White enrollment, concentrating elevated closure risk among schools that had achieved meaningful racial integration at precisely the historical moment when that integration was most fragile and most contested. Neither pattern is explained by differential enrollment trends or school academic performance. By shifting attention from student sorting to institutional disappearance, this study highlights school closure as a mechanism through which racial inequality in rural education can be reproduced even in the absence of explicit segregation policy.