Closing down a failing school doesn’t lift its students’ test scores

A new study finds that students who attend under-performing schools actually do even worse on math and reading tests after a district shutters their school and moves them into another classroom.

Closing persistently failing schools is one of the key reforms supported by the Obama administration. School closure "may seem like surrender, but in some cases it's the only responsible thing to do," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in 2009. "It instantly improves the learning conditions for those kids and brings a failing school to a swift and thorough conclusion."

But the new study, conducted by John Enberg of the RAND Corporation, questions that assumption.

Students transferred to another school after their earlier school shut down performed worse on reading and math tests--even if the new school performed better overall in academic terms than the former one had. The study did find at least that a higher performing school would minimize a student's drop in test scores--but the drop still occurred.

"Our analysis does not necessarily support school closures as means for improving student achievement," Enberg and his co-authors write. "These results suggest that the achievement of students transferring from closed schools will happen only if students are moved to schools that are dramatically higher-performing than the ones they left."

This can be a challenge, since many areas with "dropout factory" schools don't have other, better schools nearby.

The education world has struggled with how to improve the handful of schools that are persistently terrible. The Obama administration provides billions of dollars to states on the condition that they take drastic measures to lift the performance of the bottom 5 percent of their schools. To access the funds, states must make schools replace most of their staff, turn into a charter school, or shut the institution down altogether.

According to an analysis by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, 81 percent of students in the nation's worst schools are students of color.

But the RAND group's research also has implications for students who aren't stuck in dropout factories. Even though the study focused on schools in an urban district shut down for poor performance, schools in rural areas may see their schools close--even if they're high-performing--as districts try to save money through consolidation.

(Via EdWeek)

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