Abandoning schools can be perilous for politicians. When Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor, decided in 2013 to shut down 47 public schools that were half-empty and had atrocious results, he sparked protests that nearly cost him the next election. In New York, Michael Bloomberg, who once ran the city, infuriated teachers’ unions because he allowed charter schools to replace traditional public schools that didn’t work. In India as well, closure of government schools with too few pupils outrages politicians in particular.
Parents worry that closure could disrupt their children’s education. Children don’t want to lose their friends. Teachers worry about their jobs.
However, a new report from the Thomas Fordham Institute, a think-tank, suggests closures are good for students. Researchers tracked 23,000 displaced pupils from shut-down district and charter schools in eight Ohio cities between 2006-12. Ohio’s urban public schools have long struggled with competition from charter schools and declining populations (the state’s eight largest cities have lost more than 50,000 students in the past eight years). Those who stayed found themselves in empty or failing schools.
The Fordham study says closures ultimately benefit pupils from wretched schools. Once a school is closed, most children end up in better ones, where they eventually get higher grades. Three years after closure, children were found to have gained the equivalent of at least an extra month of learning in their new schools. Those who went from a failing charter school to a high-performing one did even better, gaining 58 more days of learning in reading and 88 days in maths.
Most of the closed district schools were in deprived areas. Nearly three-quarters of the children were black and more than 90 percent poor. The report concluded that “though fraught with controversy and political peril, shuttering bad schools might just be a saving grace for students who need the best education they can get”.
(Excerpted and adapted from )