To ensure that pupils aren’t stuck in chronically low-performing schools, policymakers are increasingly turning to strategies such as permanent closure or charter-school takeovers. But do these strategies benefit students? A couple recent studies, including our own from Ohio and one from New York City, have found that closing troubled schools improves outcomes. Meanwhile, just one study from Tennessee has examined charter takeovers, and its results were mostly inconclusive.
A new study from Louisiana adds to this research, examining whether closures and charter takeovers improve student outcomes. The analysis uses student-level data and statistical methods to examine the impact of such interventions on students’ state test scores, graduation rates, and matriculation to college. The study focuses on New Orleans and Baton Rouge, with the interventions occurring between 2008 and 2014. During this period, fourteen schools were closed and seventeen were taken over by charter management organizations. Most of these schools—twenty-six of the thirty-one—were located in New Orleans. The five Baton Rouge schools were all high schools.
The study finds that students tend to earn higher test scores after their schools are closed or taken over. In New Orleans, the impact of the interventions was positive and statistically significant on state math and reading scores. New Orleans high-schoolers also experienced an uptick in on-time graduation rates as a result of the interventions, though the Baton Rouge analysis reveals a negative impact on graduation (more on that below). No significant effects were found on college-going rates in either city. With respect to intervention type, the analysis uncovers little difference. Both closure and charter takeover improved pupil achievement. Likewise, the effects were similar on graduation rates—overall neutral when taking together both cities’ results.
More importantly, the research indicates that these intense interventions benefit students most when they result in attendance in a markedly better school. Post-intervention, New Orleans students attended much higher-performing schools, as measured by value added, while in Baton Rouge, students landed in lower quality schools, perhaps explaining the lower graduation rates. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that the positive effects are more pronounced when schools are phased out over time—that is, the closure or takeover is announced and no new students are allowed to enroll—thus minimizing the costs of disruption. These results largely track what we found in Ohio, where students made greater gains on state tests when they transferred to a higher-performing school post-closure.
While not well liked by the general public, the hard evidence continues to accumulate that, given quality alternatives, students benefit when policymakers close or strongly intervene in dysfunctional schools.
SOURCE: Whitney Bross, Douglas N. Harris, and Lihan Liu, The Effects of Performance-Based School Closure and Charter Takeover on Student Performance, Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (October 2016).
