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.
"Intervention" students - those affected by closures or charter takeovers - saw test score gains over time. Chart via ERA NOLA.
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. (more…)
Relying on an outdated report to criticize charter schools in New Orleans is bad enough, but Jerusha Conner, an an associate professor of education at Villanova University has this notion that competition between charter schools and public schools will help some students become "winners" and leave others to remain "losers."
She forgets traditional district schools in a competition-free environment still produce “winners and losers,” as she phrases it. There were plenty of losers in New Orleans public schools before the storm.
New Orleans is beginning to demonstrate reform can lift all boats. There is no guarantee that the strong and positive results can be replicated elsewhere, and legitimate questions remain about governance and inclusion.
Villanova University
Still, the real lesson of New Orleans is that reform is never done. Many of the problems Conner decries are being addressed by more recent innovations, like a universal enrollment system, which are designed to ensure equity.
Also, for the umpteenth time, teachers union leader Albert Shanker did not create the "original vision" for charter schools.
