“Demography is destiny” is a cliché, but that doesn’t make it untrue. In a world filled with uncertainty, one thing that America’s schools can bank on is fewer students to go around. As a Bellwether analysis released earlier this month explained, birth rates are down 14 percent over the past decade, and that already means shrinking enrollment in America’s elementary and middle schools, with declines coming soon in high schools, too.
Yes, the Covid-era shift to homeschools and other options is a factor, but that’s dwarfed by America’s baby bust, which has been particularly dramatic in many of our big cities. For instance, Philadelphia, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles have had roughly a quarter of schools show declines of 20 percent or more between the 2019–20 and 2021–22 years.
Traditionally, when confronted with difficult challenges such as these, district leaders have dragged their feet. There’s an obvious course of action, but like the rest of us, they know that closing schools is unpopular and divisive. Yet, in some communities, the status quo has become increasingly untenable—costly, inefficient, and educationally ineffective.
In Chicago, where 35 percent of seats are now unfilled, nearly three in five school buildings are underutilized.
In Milwaukee, at least forty schools are “significantly underenrolled” (though that hasn’t stopped the district from requesting a 30 percent increase in property taxes).
In Broward County, Florida, sixty-seven schools are now operating at less than 70 percent capacity.
The same can be said for forty-eight schools in Fort Worth.
And so on and so forth.
Ample research makes clear that forcing students to switch schools can be traumatic and even harmful, especially if they end up attending lower-performing campuses. Yet closing an underenrolled school is beneficial when displaced students land in better alternatives. And of course, the primary purpose of most closures isn’t just to help this generation of students. It’s to ensure that innumerable children in future generations are also well-served.
That’s because keeping underenrolled schools on life support is expensive in both dollar and educational terms. For example, Chicago Public Schools now spends nearly $70,000 on each student who attends Douglass High School, which is currently operating at an astonishing 4 percent of its intended capacity. Districts operate on a fixed pool of funds, so maintaining underenrolled buildings drains dollars from all of a district’s schools, not just those with low student counts.
Ultimately, waiting to close a school doesn’t make pulling off the Band-Aid any less painful. It just means more wasted resources, less to go around, and more kids in desolate schools.
In the face of enrollment declines that won’t reverse for decades—if ever—common sense suggests that schools that are both underenrolled and underperforming should be the first to close.
We wondered how many such schools might exist. And we suspected that local policymakers and district officials could use a bit of cover to jumpstart these tough conversations. So, to that end, we partnered with Brookings Institution fellow Sofoklis Goulas (whose prior work on enrollment decline is well-known) to identify public schools that were both underperforming and increasingly underenrolled. The result is our latest study, Underachieving and Underenrolled: Chronically Low-Performing Schools in the Post-Pandemic Era.
To identify low-performing schools, Dr. Goulas relied on states’ own judgments, using Comprehensive Support and Improvement designations (CSI), a provision in federal law requiring states to identify:
- The lowest-performing 5 percent of their Title I schools using a set of state-defined indicators.
- High schools with graduation rates below 67 percent.
- Title I schools with very low-performing subgroups of students that did not improve after being previously identified for “additional targeted support and improvement.”
States differ vastly in how they interpret these requirements, so it doesn’t work to make cross-state comparisons. Those differences also suggest caution in interpreting the quality of these schools, as we discuss further below.
To identify schools where enrollment had declined, Dr. Goulas looked at enrollment changes between 2019–20 and 2022–23, building on his previous work. For the purposes of the study, a decline of 20 percent or greater is considered “substantial.”
So what did the analysis reveal?
- Nearly one in twelve public schools in the United States—or roughly 5,100 schools—has experienced a “substantial” enrollment decline in the wake of Covid-19 (i.e., between 2019 and 2023).
- Schools that were identified by their states as chronically low performing were more than twice as likely to experience sizable enrollment declines as other public schools.
- Nationally, close to 500 schools that states have identified as chronically low performing have experienced a substantial enrollment decline in the wake of the pandemic.
Readers can find in the report’s appendix a list identifying the 500 chronically underperforming schools where enrollment has declined substantially. But keep in mind a couple of caveats.
First, it isn’t a “bad schools list.” Frankly, we’re not fans of how some states designate their CSI schools, relying heavily on proficiency rates rather than year-over-year student-level growth. There might be some schools on the list with very low test scores but strong year-to-year growth. We would consider those good schools, not bad schools.
Second, we don’t know whether students in these communities have high-quality alternatives. Nor do we have any real insight into the condition of their facilities or the myriad logistical questions that would necessarily inform a decision regarding closure.
For these reasons and more, these 500 schools may or may not be strong candidates for closure (though in some cases, closure is likely to be the best course of action).
So if you are a parent, involved citizen/taxpayer, or local reporter looking into how closure decisions are (or aren’t) getting made, here's what we suggest that you do. Use the list to raise the following questions with district and state leaders:
- When the time comes, what criteria will policymakers use to decide which schools will be closed?
- What criteria do our state use to identify elementary and high schools for CSI? Do they include a measure of growth, in addition to proficiency? Do the criteria for high schools include anything other than graduation rates?
- How does our state or district determine which schools are “underenrolled”?
- What educational options exist for the students who currently attend these schools?
These are painful, politically fraught decisions, and we understand why district officials and local leaders often kick the school-closure can down the road for as long as they can. But many of them will eventually be forced to decide the fate of their half-empty buildings. What should inform that decision? To us, it’s clear: The foremost consideration is—within the resources available to us—what’s best for educating the students of this community?
