Politicians are wise to pay attention to public opinion data, but they are also responsible for crafting sound policies based on research and evidence. So what are they supposed to do when these two goods conflict?
Anya Kamenetz at NPR was the first to highlight the contradiction between newly released poll results from PDK International and a variety of research related to school closures (“Americans Oppose School Closures, But Research Suggests They're Not A Bad Idea”). The PDK survey revealed that 84 percent of Americans believe that failing schools should be kept open and improved rather than closed. Sixty-two percent said that if a failing public school is kept open, the best approach to improvement is to replace its faculty and administration instead of increasing spending on the same team. In other words, the majority of Americans are firmly committed to their community schools—just not the people working in them.
These findings shouldn’t come as a huge surprise (as my colleague Robert Pondiscio pointed out here). No one wants to see a school closed, no matter how persistently underperforming. For many communities, schools offer not just an education, but a place to gather that’s akin to communal houses from the past. Enrichment and after-school programs—which are profoundly important for low-income youth—often benefit from the use of school buildings. Buildings can also house wrap-around services like health centers, adult education centers, or day care centers.
In addition to their community-wide implications, school closures have also been called “psychologically damaging” for students. A 2009 University of Chicago report examining closure effects on displaced students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) found that “the largest negative impact of school closings on students’ reading and math achievement occurred in the year before the schools were closed,” leading researchers to believe that closure announcements caused “significant angst” for students, parents, and teachers that may have affected student learning.
The report also indicates that one year after students left their closed schools, their reading and math achievement was not significantly different on average from what researchers “would have expected had their schools not been closed.” This is possibly due to the fact that most displaced students re-enrolled in academically weak schools—which, though disappointing, isn’t a huge surprise either. Even those who see value in school closures will point out that if there aren’t enough high-quality seats elsewhere for displaced students, the action simply reshuffles students from one bad school to another.
So if closing schools is bad for communities and students and the American public hates it, then why is it happening? As Kamenetz points out in her NPR piece, research shows that closing schools isn’t always bad—and therein lies the contradiction. The same University of Chicago study that points to “significant angst” and flat achievement also acknowledges that “displaced students who enrolled in new schools with higher average achievement had larger gains in both reading and math than students who enrolled in receiving schools with lower average achievement.” Translation? Displaced kids who end up in better schools do better. Fordham’s 2015 study on school closures and student achievement found similar results: Three years after closure, students who attended a higher-quality school made greater progress than those who didn’t. In a recent study of closures in New York City, researchers found that “post-closure students generally enrolled in higher-performing high schools than they would have otherwise attended” and that “closures produced positive and statistically significant impacts on several key outcomes for displaced students.”
School turnarounds, on the other hand, have almost always been found to disappoint.
In The Turnaround Fallacy, Andy Smarick offers three compelling arguments for giving up on “fixing” failing schools. First, data shows that very few past turnaround efforts have succeeded. (California is a prime example: After three years of interventions in the lowest-performing 20 percent of schools, only one of 394 middle and high schools managed to reach the mark of “exemplary progress.” Elementary schools fared better—11 percent met the goal—but the results were still disheartening.) Second, there isn’t any clear evidence for how to make turnaround efforts more successful in the future. Even the Institute of Education Sciences seems unable to find turnaround strategies that are backed by strong evidence. And finally, although the long list of turnaround failures in education makes it reasonable for advocates to look outside the sector for successful models to import, there aren’t many. A review of the “two most common approaches to organizational reform in the private sector” found that both approaches “failed to generate the desired results two-thirds of the time or more.”
Let’s review. Many American schools are consistently failing to properly educate students. The public doesn’t like the idea of closing these schools, but many research studies indicate that students who re-enroll in higher-performing schools perform better than they would have if they’d stayed in their previous schools. What the American public wants is to improve failing schools instead of closing them. Unfortunately, research shows that school turnarounds haven’t worked in the past—and no one has any idea how to make them work in the future. Overall, the phrase “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” seems particularly apropos.
So what’s a policy maker to do when schools are failing to properly educate students? Expanding the number of high-quality seats is a good place to start. We might not have a clue about how to turn around bad schools, but we do know of school models that work, especially in the charter sector. Policy makers who want to give kids immediate access to a great education should invest in expanding and replicating schools and networks that are already doing an excellent job.
Boosting the supply of excellent schools will lead to two important changes. First, many families and children will get immediate relief—and life-changing opportunities in new, better schools. And second, over time, failing schools will see their enrollment plummet, creating a fiscally unsustainable situation. At that point, officials can shut them down—not because they are failing academically, but because they are failing financially. And to my knowledge, no public opinion poll has shown Americans averse to closing half-empty, exorbitantly expensive schools. At least not yet.
