Research Brief on School Closures by CReATE (original) (raw)
Related papers
School Closings in Chicago: Staff and Student Experiences and Academic Outcomes. Research Report
2018
prior to writing this report, we presented preliminary findings to several groups, including to members of our Steering Committee, the Consortium Investors Council, and program staff at the Spencer Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust. At each presentation, participants asked us thought-provoking questions and offered helpful suggestions for our analysis, interpretation, and subsequent writing. We also received vital feedback on the penultimate draft from two external reviewers, James Kemple and Mary Pattillo, who provided important points for us to consider as we finalized this report. In addition, we received extensive written feedback on the penultimate draft from several Steering Committee members, including Gina Caneva, Lynn Cherkasky-Davis, Lila Leff, Shazia Miller, and Beatriz Ponce de León. We thank them for their close read and thoughtful comments. We also thank our colleague Todd Rosenkranz, who conducted a thorough technical read of the report, and the UChicago Consortium's communications team, including Bronwyn McDaniel, Jessica Tansey, and Jessica Puller, who were instrumental in the production of this report. We are grateful to the Spencer Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust for supporting this work and providing us with the necessary resources to conduct the analyses and write the report. We also gratefully acknowledge the Spencer Foundation and the Lewis-Sebring Family Foundation, whose operating grants support the work of the UChicago Consortium. Finally, we greatly appreciate the support from the Consortium Investor Council that funds critical work beyond the initial research: putting the research to work, refreshing the data archive, seeding new studies, and replicating previous studies.
School Closure as a Strategy to Remedy Low Performance
2017
This brief investigates whether closing schools and transferring students for the purpose of remedying low performance is an option educational decision makers should pursue. The logic of closing schools in response to low student performance goes like this: By closing low-performing schools and sending students to better-performing ones, student achievement will improve. The new, higher-performing schools will give transfer students access to higher-quality peer and teacher networks, which in turn will have a beneficial effect on academic outcomes. The threat of closure may motivate low-performing schools (and their districts) to improve in order to preempt school closure. To investigate this logic, we draw on an evidence base that consists of peer-reviewed research studies and well-researched policy reports, but relatively few of these exist for school closures. We ask: 1. How often do school closings occur and for what reasons? 2. What is the impact on students of closing schools for reasons of performance? 3. What is the impact of closing schools on the public school system in which closure has taken place? 4. What is the impact of school closures on students of various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, and on local communities and neighborhoods? Recommendations The relatively limited evidence base suggests that school closures are not a promising strategy for remedying low student performance. • Even though school closures have dramatically increased, jurisdictions largely shun the option of "closure and transfer" in the context of the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. Policy and district actors should treat the infrequency of this turnaround option as a caution. • School closures have at best weak and decidedly mixed benefits; at worst they have detrimental repercussions for students if districts do not ensure that seats at higher-performing schools are available for transfer students. In districts where such assignments are in short or uncertain supply, "closure and transfer" is a decidedly undesirable option.
A recent report found a general increase in test scores of students displaced from closed urban schools in Ohio, who were disproportionately African American and low-income. Students displaced from closed charter schools showed gains in math but not reading, relative to students from non-closed schools; students displaced from district schools showed gains in math and reading. Gains associated with closure were greater for students who transferred to " higher-performing schools " —those with higher test scores. Overall achievement growth in receiving schools, however, decreased in the year that they accommodated displaced students. Although the finding that displaced students showed improvement in test scores is encouraging, several factors limit the study's policy implications. The report itself cautions that the potential for test-score gains depends on the availability of higher-performing schools for displaced students, a condition often unmet. Forty percent of stu...
Review of Lights Off: Practice and Impact of Closing Low-Performing Schools
National Education Policy Center, 2017
This report provides an extensive analysis based on the most comprehensive dataset ever assembled for school closure research, including 1,522 low-performing schools that were closed across 26 states between 2006 and 2013. The report finds that even when holding constant academic performance, schools were more likely to be closed if they enrolled higher proportions of minority and low-income students. It also finds test score declines, relative to the comparison group, for two groups of students displaced by closures: those who transferred to schools with a prior record of relatively lower test-score performance and those who transferred to schools with equivalent past test-score performance. The slightly less than half of students who transferred to higher performing schools showed academic improvement relative to their matched peers. In general, although the reviewers found this to be a careful and rigorous study, they see a few missed opportunities. First, the report’s focus on some tenuous analyses (involving pre-closure transfers) obscures its most important findings – disproportionality in school closures and inadequate numbers of higher quality receiving schools, leading to performance declines for most. Second, the reviewers are concerned about statistical modeling choices and matching challenges that may threaten the validity of subgroup analyses (charter school students). Finally, the reviewers would have liked to see the report acknowledge the inescapable moral dimensions of school closure: The communities most likely to be negatively affected are unlikely to have participated in closure decisions.
2015
This report has been more than two years in the making and benefited greatly from guidance, insights, and critique provided by colleagues at the Research Alliance and elsewhere. At the Research Alliance, Michael Segeritz was instrumental in clarifying the statistical models and many features of the analytic design. Christy Baker-Smith provided many hours of assistance with data management, early versions of the analysis, and the initial presentations of the empirical findings. Adriana Villavicencio offered constructive feedback on multiple iterations of the findings and drafts of the report. The author is especially grateful for the innumerable discussions with Saskia Levy Thompson about the broader context of high school reform in New York City over the past decade. Saskia's extraordinary insights were drawn from her more than 15 years of work with the City's schools as a practitioner at the Urban Assembly,
Turning around Low-Performing Schools in Chicago. Summary Report
Consortium on Chicago School Research, 2012
T 773-702-3364 F 773-702-2010 ccsr.uchicago.edu OUR MISSION The Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) at the University of Chicago conducts research of high technical quality that can inform and assess policy and practice in the Chicago Public Schools. We seek to expand communication among researchers, policy makers, and practitioners as we support the search for solutions to the problems of school reform. CCSR encourages the use of research in policy action and improvement of practice, but does not argue for particular policies or programs. Rather, we help to build capacity for school reform by identifying what matters for student success and school improvement, creating critical indicators to chart progress, and conducting theory-driven evaluation to identify how programs and policies are working.