A new Education Next article examines the impact of New York City school closures on a variety of student outcomes, including graduation rates, attendance, and academic performance.
Analysts studied twenty-nine high school closures announced between 2003 and 2009, analyzing outcomes for over twenty thousand affected ninth graders in several groups: those who were just beginning their ninth-grade year when closure was announced (called the “phase-out” cohort); those who chose to stay after the closure announcement (the “phase-out” process allowed them to stay until their expected year of graduation); those who transferred elsewhere; and those rising ninth graders who were required to attend a different high school because of closure. The schools in the treatment group slated for closure were, as you would expect, among the lowest-performing in the city. (Another group of high schools that exhibited both similar poor performance and similar low-achieving students served as the comparison group, although it was not clear why they weren’t slated for closure.)
Analysts first predicted the impact of the closure decision on graduation rates for the “phase-out” cohort. They found small but statistically insignificant differences, concluding that the phase-out process did not negatively impact graduation rates or make a clear impact on credits earned, Regents exams passed, or attendance.
Next they examined impacts on those who remained in the closure schools during the phase-out process and found that they were more likely to graduate high school; yet on most other indicators (such as attendance and credits earned), student improvement was similar to that in the comparison group. For students who transferred from their ninth-grade school to another city high school before the end of their twelfth-grade year, there were no significantly different patterns in outcomes among the treatment and comparison students.
Finally, they examined the trajectory of those students who would have been assigned to one of the closure schools but weren’t; instead, they were made to attend a different high school than the one targeted for closure. This group comprised roughly eleven thousand eighth-grade students who lived in neighborhoods or attended middle schools that fed into the closure schools and who had backgrounds similar to those who had previously attended the closure schools. It was found that they generally enrolled in higher-performing schools and performed better there. Specifically, the closures improved graduation rates for displaced students by 15.1 percentage points compared to the comparison group; they also improved the rates of students receiving Regents diplomas and boosted ninth-grade attendance.
Analysts conclude that “this is compelling evidence that students benefited from having a low-performing option eliminated from their high school choice set.” We’re accumulating robust evidence that closing low-performing schools has the potential to improve educational outcomes, even though it can be emotionally draining for the impacted students, parents, teachers, and larger community. Perhaps, like the breakup of a dysfunctional romance, we need to focus on the longer-term benefits of school closure rather than the immediate heartache and nostalgia for the past.
SOURCE: James J. Kemple, "School Closures in New York," Education Next (August 2016).
