Impact of Closing Schools on Students and Communities

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New Orleans and Chicago are probably THE most infamous locales where school closure has occurred en masse.

First I’ll discuss Chicago. The problematic outcomes of school closure are readily apparent in the data from Chicago and has been fairly consistently bad news over time. For example, the Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education (CReATE) found that

• school closures have historically had a negative impact on children’s academic performance
• 94% of students from closed CPS schools did not go on to “academically strong” new schools.
• School closures have not historically resulted in the savings predicted by school officials.
• Closure-related costs have consistently been underestimated or understated by officials.
• School closures have exacerbated racial inequalities and segregation in Chicago.
• Approximately 90% of the school closings have impacted predominately African American communities according to CReATE’s data.

Then there is Louisiana. The locale where top-down education reformers pressed for widespread school closures after Katrina.

Have school closures spurred an education miracle 10 years after the storm?

In a recent policy brief that I authored and was released by the Network for Public Education (See the post Education reform crescendo at #Katrina10), I collected publicly available data from state and federal sources. These data show that Louisiana and the RSD are last in nearly last in nearly all educational outcomes. More than 10 years after school closure and choice arrived in New Orleans— the results from top-down reform are dismal.

McKinsey report predicted Boston would save $2m for each school we close, which is about 0.18% or 2/10th of 1% of the Boston Schools budget. Closing five schools would save a mere $10m annually and deprive 5 communities of its schools. What makes these schools such a deal is the we bought the real estate and built the building already. Now the costs are about operations and renovations.

If it takes two decades to renovate 125 schools, then it takes two decades. Boston Schools are 34% of the city budget.

Research and data should inform our discussion about school closure. The predominance of the currently available research demonstrates that there is decreased student achievement, increased racial inequality, and parents of color still don’t have access to properly resourced high-quality neighborhood schools.

As a result, it seems clear that the data suggests we consider alternatives to the top-down school closures approach for reforming schools. There is scant evidence in the research literature that supports top-down school closure policies. I believe this is largely because school closure has been— as Jitu Brown said in his opening— a shell game that does not directly address the needs of students or the communities that they live in.

Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to think about community-based solutions that don’t ignore the needs that students bring to schools and the severe resource inequities that still plague in schools located in communities of color. It is my hope that the re-authorization of ESEA that will be signed today will provide momentum for a slate of community-based, democratically controlled approaches to education reform. I look forward to hearing more about community schools as one of the community-based alternatives to the recent decade of top-down reform in the next panel.