School Closures: Lucked out or Locked out?

On November 30, 2011, Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean Claude Brizard announced the closure of ten city schools as part of a plan to improve student performance across the district.  Though controversial, the logic was straightforward: moving students into higher-performing schools allows for better educational outcomes and relieves the distress associated with declining enrollment and city-wide budget cuts.

While the results of this particular decision are not yet settled, a recent paper in the Journal of Urban Economics examines the issue more broadly.  The question that researchers attempt to answer is the same question raised by Brizard’s decision: can improvements to student outcomes, as measured by attendance and test scores, result from the strategic closure of certain failing schools?

The short answer is that improvements are possible but not ensured. To understand how closure impacts district wide performance, authors Engberg, Gill, Zamarro, and Zimmer examine outcomes in an anonymous urban district, where leaders strategically closed schools based on student performance. Students displaced by school closures were transitioned into schools with better academic records. Researchers then examined test scores and attendance rates of each relocated student. They also collect data on students remaining in higher-performing schools that received an influx of new students.

Engberg, Gill, Zamarro, and Zimmer find that most commonly, forced movement from one school to another negatively affects student attendance rates and academic achievement. That said, when students move from lower-performing schools to higher performing schools the negative influence on attendance subsides after a year.  For achievement on standardized tests, negative effects seemingly continue on well past the transition. Still, if the transition is from a very low performing school to one considerably better, there are positive effects on the attendance and achievement. The authors found no evidence that an influx of new students harmed students already enrolled in the school.

Approached from a policy perspective, these results complicate the idea that districts can improve performance by simply closing low performing schools. Except for those districts with an incredibly large gap in performance across schools, school closure may cause too much disruption to benefit students. Yet if districts must perform closures for other reasons, reassigning students to higher performing schools helps them overcome some of the drawbacks of transitioning to a new school.

Feature photo: cc/Robert Couse-Baker