A Blow for School Choice Advocates
I’m not really an advocate of school choice for the simple reason that in my sparsely populated, physically rugged part of Appalachia it is a somewhat impractical approach to providing students with improved education environments. If little my school (about 110 students this year in 7 grades with 10.4 teachers) doesn’t adequately serve the kids in Jenkinjones and Anawalt, it’s a hour or so on the bus to the next closest school (which probably doesn’t have room for them).
Simply closing “bad” schools might be a marvelous idea in Chicago (we’ll come back to that idea), but in rural America it takes a few years of planning and usually requires that districts find outside resources. It’s also a gamble in the sense that you can close an old school if it’s “bad,” but if you decide in six or eight years that the new school is just as bad, academically, you’re pretty much done with the school closure option. No district in my part of rural Appalachia is going to close a 10 year old building for any reason short of a natural disaster. Closing an old school and reopening it with new staff is also problematic because we are chronically short of teachers in key areas.
The Chicago Tribune looked recently at a study of school closures in Chicago. The study concluded that the effort to close poorly performing schools in Chicago between 2001 and 2006 resulted in only 6% of the students from closed schools ending up “at top schools, as measured by standardized test scores.” The study also concluded that students at closed schools regressed during the period of time between the announcement that their school would be closed and the time it was actually shut down. Then they showed no change in educational performance at their new school.
The Special Education Law Blog draws a fascinating conclusion in a post on the topic: Closing really bad schools doesn’t accomplish much of anything if you don’t have room for those kids at good schools (of if you don’t have good schools at all). School choice puts the cart before the horse. Step one is not closing bad schools, it’s building good schools. When a district succeeds at that, then it can argue about whether to close the “bad” schools or apply what they’ve learned from building the good schools to the bad schools in the hope that they’ll improve.
