Closing a school can tear the fabric of a community, create job insecurity for educators and force families to make tough decisions about what’s next for their children.
But if it’s done the right way, it can help students get significantly better results.
A new study of closures and charter school takeovers in Louisiana suggests minimizing harm and instability for students might be among the keys to making these extreme measures work.
Perhaps even more crucially, it suggests officials should close schools for poor academic results, not other bureaucratic or budgetary reasons, and that school systems need to ensure affected students actually wind up in better schools.
The study, released this week by Tulane University’s Education Research Alliance, found closing low-performing schools, or turning them over to new charter operators, was tied to a whopping 20 percentage-point jump in graduation rates for New Orleans students (although the effect on college-going was close to zero).
Affected students also saw significant improvements in test scores.
The research alliance has been probing the results of the sweeping education reforms enacted in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Its findings have shown that converting the city’s schools to a nearly all-charter system, importing teachers from around the country, and drawing a massive infusion of philanthropic donations led to substantial improvements in student results.
Its latest study suggests closures and charter takeovers of low-performing schools were a big part of that story, accounting for somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of the overall improvement in New Orleans public schools.
But that does not mean school closures have worked everywhere. The same study shows closures lowered graduation rates by more than 10 percentage points in Baton Rouge.
This tale of two cities in the same state shouldn’t come as a total surprise. The Lousiana study documents a long line of research suggesting the effects of closures and takeovers can vary a lot from one city to another.
The researchers point to an important reason for the difference. The students in New Orleans typically wound up in better-performing schools after their schools were shuttered or taken over by a new charter operator. In Baton Rouge, on average, the opposite was true.
This suggests school systems need to think not just about closing poor-performing schools, but about opening better performers in their place, and ensuring that displaced students truly have access to them.
As the researchers (Whitney Bross, Doug Harris and Lihan Liu of Tulane University) write in their conclusion:
In short, the key to making closures and takeovers work is to ensure that directly affected students end up in better schools after the intervention. If they do not, the results will be generally negative for students no matter what we call the intervention or what other redeeming qualities it might have. This means decisions should be based on educational quality rather than politics or ancillary issues, and much thought should be given to what other schools will be available to future generations of students.
This should add some nuance to the debate over school closures. The issue has divided some in the school choice movement, with one camp arguing regulatory closures may do more harm than good, and the other arguing they can be a crucial lever to improve schools. (A related concern is whether test scores offer enough information to make closure decisions.)
Stability for students seems to matter, too. When a school was taken over by a new charter operator, the Louisiana research shows that students who remained in that school were more likely to benefit than those who moved elsewhere.
This points to an under-appreciated element of the closely watched education reforms in New Orleans: The desire among their leaders to continuously improve the system.
During an event Monday night discussing the findings, Dana Peterson, the deputy superintendent of external affairs for Louisiana’s Recovery School District, said that in 2014, the city began giving top priority in school choice admissions to students whose previous schools were closed.
This change, which happened after data collection for the study was complete, means those students now stand a better chance of finding their way to a higher-quality school close to home.
“By and large, in New Orleans, the charter and closure decisions have worked,” Peterson said. But as the state-sanctioned district returns oversight to the local Orleans Parish School Board, he added, officials intend to keep learning.
