In 2006, Ohio enacted one of the nation’s first “default closure” laws, which requires the lowest-performing charter schools to shut down whether their authorizers want them to or not. The law, still in effect today, has forced twenty-four charters to close. The criteria for automatic closure are well defined in law and are based on the state’s accountability system.
This new working paper, which complements our recent study on Ohio school closures, evaluates the effect of closures induced by the automatic closure law on student achievement. (By contrast, Fordham’s study examined both district and charter closures that occurred regardless of cause, be it financial, academic, or other.) To carry out this analysis, the researchers compared the outcomes of students attending charters that closed by default to those of pupils attending charters that just narrowly escaped the state’s chopping block. The sharp “cut point” for closure versus non-closure allowed the analysts to compare very similar students who attended similarly performing schools—thus approximating a “gold-standard” random experiment.
The key finding: Students displaced by an automatic closure made significant gains in math and reading after their schools closed, a result consistent with our broader study. Moreover, the analysts found that the academic benefit for students affected by automatic closure was actually greater than the benefit for students displaced by other types of closure. The analysts estimate a 0.2 standard deviation increase in achievement after automatic closure—nearly double the effect size found in our broader closure analysis. (For some context, the black/white achievement gap is about one standard deviation.)
This suggests that Ohio’s automatic closure law has worked as intended; it forcibly shut down some of the worst-performing schools in the state, to the benefit of the children who had attended them. Meanwhile, other states could follow the example of Ohio—and ten other states—by passing an automatic closure law. Perhaps a bigger question is whether Ohio should create a default closure for poorly performing district schools, too. After all, it’s a state’s obligation to ensure that no child, regardless of her socioeconomic circumstance, ends up in a rotten school.
SOURCE: Deven Carlson and Stéphane Lavertu, “The Effect of School Closure on Student Achievement: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Ohio’s Automatic Charter School Closure Law,” Working Paper (March 2015).
