Chicago shows pitfalls of closing schools

School turnarounds are difficult — ask anyone who has been part of one — but it’s hard to see how simply closing a low-performing school is any solution.

Still, among those who favor a corporate approach to running school systems, turnarounds are viewed as not worth the investment. Closing low-performing schools has become a solution in and of itself, creating a clean slate that is somehow expected to yield better schools.

“Turnarounds have consistently shown themselves to be ineffective,” asserts Andy Smarick, a former Bush White House education aide and charter school lobbyist, in the current issue of Education Next. “[O]ur relentless preoccupation with improving the worst schools actually inhibits the development of a healthy urban public-education industry.”

Smarick doesn’t say what should happen with their students, an inconvenience in his scheme. And he evidently hasn’t read the research on Chicago’s closing schools.

After then-Chicago Schools Superintendent Arne Duncan had shut down 38 “failing” schools in Chicago from 2001 to 2006, he was compelled to shift gears and adopt a “turnaround” approach, according to a new report from the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research. Closing schools had had little effect.

‘When Schools Close’

In the Chicago report, “When Schools Close,” authors Marisa de la Torre and Julia Gwynne examine the impact on the students in these schools. They follow the displaced students, tracking their reading and math achievement, special education referrals, retentions, summer school attendance, mobility and high school performance and comparing them to students in similar schools that did not close.

What did they find?

• Most students who transferred out of closing schools in Chicago wound up in schools that were academically weak — “some of the weakest schools in the system,” the authors write. Forty percent enrolled in schools on probation and 42 percent in schools with test scores in the bottom 25 percent. Just 6 percent of displaced students moved to higher-performing schools.
• In the year before the school closed — typically the closing announcements were made in January — students’ scores showed a loss of one-and-a-half months of learning in reading and about half a month in math.
• •A year after students left the schools, their reading and math achievement was no different. They were also less likely to enroll in summer school and more likely to change schools again.

“Overall, we found few effects, either positive or negative, of school closings on the achievement of displaced students,” the authors write.

Closing New York schools

Here in New York, where the chancellor and mayor have already closed some 100 schools and plan to close many more, researchers have found that shuttering large high schools can do inadvertent damage to other schools.

In “The New Marketplace,” a June 2009 report by the Center for New York City Affairs, authors Clara Hemphill and Kim Nauer chronicle the fortunes of Jane Addams HS in the Bronx, a popular and successful vocational school that trained mostly girls for careers in nursing, cosmetology and tourism.

It was badly destabilized by a surge of 200 more students — including many boys who didn’t want to be there — from nearby closing schools. Attendance and graduation rates declined dramatically. “They took a really good, functioning building and destroyed it,” former Jane Addams Chapter Leader Elliot Gloskin told the authors.

What about the students

One thing that gets lost in the “close ‘em down” furor is that students’ lives and support systems can be upended. When Fenger HS in Chicago was closed this year, all the staff — even the custodians — were dismissed, though the students stayed.

“We have relationships with kids who may not even have another adult in their homes or their lives,” wrote Deborah Lynch, former Chicago teacher union president who teaches at a school near Fenger. In a letter to the Chicago Sun Times on Oct 2 she said, “How could anyone expect that completely eliminating all the professionals and staff of a tough high-poverty high school could be a good thing?”

And how could anyone expect that motivated, skilled teachers would want to come to work in such a school?

‘We know how to turn schools around’

Smarick and his colleagues might lend an ear to Allen Odden, professor of educational leadership at the University of Wisconsin, who has studied schools for some 40 years.

In a commentary in the Dec. 7 Education Week called “We Know How to Turn Schools Around,” Odden calls for leaders to implement educational strategies, not just structural ones, to fix struggling schools.

To turn schools around, he says, “Throw out the old curriculum and adopt new textbooks, create new curriculum programs, and start to build, over time, a common understanding of effective instruction ... focus intensely on instructional practices shown to work.”

Move beyond “a concentration on state tests,” he continues, to use a variety of formative and diagnostic assessments. Create collaborative teacher teams to improve professional development. Make extensive use of expert teachers. “The bottom line is that the country knows how to turn around low-performing education systems,” he concludes.

His recommended strategies aren’t easy, and they won’t free up real estate for a new charter school. But a closed school is just an empty building. A turnaround school is a community jewel.