Exactly one decade ago, a national coalition of activists released “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” a report making the moral case against school closures. The subtitle—“Racism, School Closures, and Public School Sabotage”—made clear that racial disparities would be a central talking point in political efforts to keep underenrolled buildings open.
The strategy apparently worked so well that the latest “action kit” for opposing efforts to close buildings in the face of declining enrollment and expiring pandemic-era federal support leans heavily on the same arguments. “Nationwide, Black and Latine (sic) students disproportionately experience school closures,” the new strategy document asserts on its first page.
It is true that the public schools shuttered in the first two decades of this century disproportionately enrolled students of color. But this does not imply, as closure opponents claim, that these buildings closed because of the racial composition of their student bodies. Nor does it show that the closures were a bad policy or that they made minority students worse off academically. Behind the numbers is a much more complex story about the inequities built into our public education system and the dysfunctional politics that creates them. Continuing to divert scarce resources to keep half-empty buildings open is likely to worsen many of these disparities.
Lying with statistics
In a May letter to the U.S. Department of Education, several civil rights groups boldly asserted that they had “compelling evidence that districts are disproportionately and intentionally opting to close schools serving majority Black students” (emphasis added). They went on to cite a new Harvard Education Review study by Stanford professor Francis Pearman (who discussed it recently on Fordham’s podcast). There’s a problem, however: That study does not show what the civil rights legal groups and Pearman have claimed.
Pearman and his co-author collected records on school closures from the National Center for Educational Statistics and then combined these data with a variety of other information about individual school buildings, including test scores in some grades. Looking at the simple bivariate relationship, they found that majority-Black schools were a shocking three-times more likely to have closed. But statistically adjusting for a small number of other observable school characteristics dramatically reduced the apparent disparities—eliminating nearly 90 percent of the initial racial gap! The remaining 10 percent, they concluded, must be evidence of intentional racial discrimination.
That is not the case. Rather, the residual disparities simply reflect the fact that the authors could include only a limited set of observable characteristics in their analysis and their statistical model was missing other key factors that drive closure decisions.[i]
Perhaps the most important variable is the district in which a school is located. Historically, closures were rare. In a typical school year, only about 3 percent of all districts shuttered even a single school. (Recent enrollment losses suggest that closures will become more common in coming years.) As it happens, districts that have at least one majority Black school were far more likely to also experience a school closure, creating an apparent correlation between the racial composition of students and the probability that their school closes.[ii]
This correlation tells us only that districts with large minority student populations were more likely to close schools, not that they intentionally targeted these closures in a discriminatory way among the buildings that they operate. Comparing the student bodies of schools that close to buildings in other districts—most of them located in other parts of the country—that don’t close any tells us nothing about which factors actually influence the key decisionmakers in the affected communities. It’s like trying to determine whether snow lifts are sited in a racist way by comparing the areas around publicly owned ski resorts to neighborhoods in parts of the country that don’t get any snow.
To establish that districts are intentionally closing schools serving majority Black students, as the civil rights groups have asserted, we would need first to limit the analysis to districts that actually close schools, and only in the years in which such closures occur. Then we need to compare the racial composition of schools that close to the student bodies of schools in the same district that remain open. I carry out exactly this analysis in my forthcoming book, which includes a chapter on the politics of school closure.
Overall, I find no evidence that districts are significantly more likely to close heavily minority schools.[iii] Instead, school enrollment size is by far the most important factor. Average test scores matter somewhat, as well, but only on the margin. Unfortunately for those of us who wish that districts used closures strategically to improve academic outcomes, student achievement growth—the best measure of actual school quality—does not seem to affect district consolidation decisions at all, at least not for elementary and middle schools, for which we have available data.
Root causes
The evidence makes clear that the real story is not about districts intentionally targeting heavily minority schools for closure. Rather, it’s about heavily minority districts facing the greatest closure pressures. What explains these district-level differences?
Opponents of closure blame fiscal challenges—arguing that these districts are “chronically underfunded”—and a history of racist policies. Once again, however, such critics miss the mark.
Start with finances. It is true that, historically, a system of funding schools based on local property taxes created disturbing inequalities. Fortunately, that is not how we fund education in most states today. State governments have stepped up in recent decades, and state dollars tend to be distributed in a progressive way to compensate for differences in local tax bases. As a result, Black and Hispanic students now attend school districts that spend more per student compared to districts attended by white students in the same state. Communities facing some of the most serious building under-utilization issues and the most vocal opposition to closure—including Boston, Chicago, and New York—are also among some the highest spending.
As other evidence of racist policy contributing to closures, opponents also weave together complex webs of hypotheses and conspiracy theories that attempt to link modern enrollment losses to gentrification pressures. To be sure, the widespread shortage of affordable housing is real—but its connection to school closures tenuous at best. (And well-meaning efforts to increase minority political representation in local government seem to have made the housing shortages worse.)
Closure opponents ignore what is perhaps the most important factor—a long history of dysfunctional governance in heavily minority districts that continues to deprive students of color of equal educational opportunities. This dysfunction has contributed both to these districts’ enrollment declines and to the inability of school leaders to respond appropriately. In other research, we have shown that few voters who elect school boards in such communities have kids of their own and that these voters look nothing like the students being educated in local schools. Such communities also tend to have powerful teachers unions and highly prescriptive union contracts, including provisions that result in the most heavily minority and disadvantaged schools being assigned the least experienced teachers. During the pandemic, these districts were among the last to resume in-person learning, delays that exacerbated already large racial achievement gaps and produced substantial enrollment losses that have directly led to the current conversations about rightsizing.
These are all examples of outrageous racial injustices. But school closures are mere symptoms of the underlying political and governance challenges. Preventing closures does nothing to address any of the root causes or to resolve the many other issues that deprive low-income students and students of color of the education they deserve.
Lessons from Chicago
No city has attracted more attention in the school closure debates than Chicago, which went through several waves of consolidation over the past two decades. It appears as a case study in the new strategy document under the section titled “They Defeated School Closures, You Can Too!” Chicago is indeed instructive—as a cautionary tale about how misleading and cynical rhetoric and claims of racism can be weaponized in school closure debates.
Today, the Chicago school system is again suffering from serious excess capacity, and advocates again blame underfunding. “I’m no politician, but I do know that schools underutilized are schools underfunded,” a Chicago parent is quoted as saying in a book about school closures in that city, a quote that is repeated in the new strategy document.
Thanks to new federal requirements, we now have access to school-level expenditure data that definitively debunk such underfunding claims. Chicago’s most underenrolled high schools spent several times more per student than the district average last year, with half a dozen spending more than $40,000 per student, on par with the tuition in some of the country’s most exclusive private schools. The district’s smallest high school, Douglass Academy High School, enrolled only thirty students last year and cost the district nearly $70,000 per student to operate. Just keeping this single building open required the district to spend over $1 million per year more than it would have cost to educate its students at a different school—money that was diverted from other programming serving students district wide.
As an example of how they say racism has contributed to school enrollment losses and, ultimately, closure, activists in Chicago also point to the demolition of the city’s notorious high-rise public housing in the early 2000s. This is a bizarre case of revisionist history.
Chicago’s public housing projects were themselves a product of racist policies, federal courts found. The buildings were so violent and living conditions so horrendous that they were the setting of a 1990s horror movie and best-selling book. Most importantly, research has shown that the demolition clearly benefited the former residents, almost all racial minorities. These residents moved to better neighborhoods and their children went on to graduate from high school at higher rates, were less likely to be arrested, and more likely to be employed in early adulthood. Hardly evidence of racism.
Another oft-cited claim is that previous school closures in Chicago negatively affected academic outcomes of the displaced students. Again, that is not what the evidence actually shows. It is true that test scores and attendance rates of the affected students declined. However, these declines occurred the year the closures were announced—before a single building had actually been closed! The timing of the declines suggests that adult political conflict and efforts to keep schools open were responsible, not the closures themselves—something anti-closure advocates today should keep in mind.
Former Chicago superintendent Arne Duncan, who later served as President Obama’s secretary of education, has a very different memory of what happened in his hometown. In his book, Duncan recounts attending meetings of community members opposed to the closures he oversaw. At one such meeting, Duncan was confronted by an angry mother upset that her child’s school was on the chopping block.
After she accused Duncan of racism, the superintendent walked her through years of achievement data from the school—showing her how it had continued to fail generation after generation of students in her neighborhood. “If I were a racist, then I would leave this school exactly as it is,” the superintendent told her. “That’s not what I want. They’re children; I believe in them as much as you do. They can’t wait for things to improve any longer.”
This is an important point, one that often gets lost amid the disingenuous claims of racism that characterize many of the closure debates. Everyone who cares about racial justice should be focused on doing what’s best for students and their learning—not on school buildings or the employment impacts of closing them. Ensuring that districts prioritize academic considerations in their closure decisions—especially achievement growth over time—and that affected students receive spots at better schools should be our top priority, not keeping as many under-utilized buildings open as possible.
“Sometimes,” Duncan wrote in his book, “closing a school is the best thing that can happen to a group of students.” The best available research supports him.
[i] Although not discussed in the article, the authors’ full set of results actually show that school size was by the far the strongest predictor of school closure. Their estimates imply that increasing student enrollment by a standard deviation decreases the odds of closure by at least seven times more than the predicted effect of being a majority Black campus.
[ii] The authors do try to control for district demographics in a limited way, but this does not fully address the problem.
[iii] Like Pearman’s study, I used the official closure indicators in federal data. Tulane University economist Doug Harris recently released an alternative dataset manually identifying several thousand additional schools that may have been closed but not flagged as such in official statistics. Repeating the analysis using Harris’s data does show that majority Black elementary schools are significantly more likely to close—but the gap is orders of magnitude smaller than Pearman and his co-author found. There is also no difference among middle schools, and Hispanic student enrollment doesn’t predict closure for either type of school.
