The Best of The 74

The 74 online just released their top 2023 articles. Over the next two weeks, eight of those articles will be presented here, with commentary added.

In January of 2023, Tim Daly, CEO of EdNavigator, a nonprofit organization that helps hardworking families stay on track for success in school and beyond, wrote this about closing schools,

“School closures are awful. I won’t argue otherwise.”

“But they are almost certainly on the horizon. Due to enrollment shifts and failing birth rates, many districts nationwide are experiencing a surge in empty seats. For a few years, federal funding tied to pandemic recovery may allow districts to delay difficult consolidation decisions. However, there will come a time when the expense of staffing, maintaining and operating an outsized number of schools becomes untenable – and closures will be the only option.”

“The numbers tell the same story in city after city: Just 60% of the available placements in Indianapolis are occupied. After shrinking by several hundred thousand students since 2000, Los Angeles expects to lose another 28% of its enrollment over the next eight years. Shifts in Boston have left the district with the equivalent of 16.5 unused school buildings. Chicago, which famously closed 50 schools in 2013 under then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, subsequently self-imposed a five-year moratorium on closures. Then, in 2021, a new state law prohibited closures and consolidations until 2025. Meanwhile, enrollment has plummeted. In fact, Chicago has 80,000 fewer students than it did in 2013. This school year, district data show over 40 schools with fewer than 200 students.”

“We are confronted by a national wave of enrollment decline in our urban systems.”

“Unpleasant though school closures may be, there are steps leaders can take to mitigate their negative effects on families. The most irresponsible approach is living in denial even when closures have become inevitable.”

“Denver Public Schools recently provided a high-profile example of what not to do. Its fiasco began in June, 2021, when the school board passed a resolution directing district leaders to address declining enrollment. Ten schools were eventually identified for closure – including some that required additional subsidies of more than $500,000 each school year to maintain basic services for students, due to their small size. After community pushback, Superintendent Alex Marrero cut the list to five. By the time the school board was set to vote on the closures, Marrero removed three more schools, leaving just two. The board ultimately did not vote to close any schools and sent Marrero’s team back to the drawing board. To sum up, the district spent 18 months to make no decision at all.”

“It breaks my heart to see schools close. Most often, the effects are felt primarily by lower-income families. Neighborhoods lose beloved institutions and vital pieces of their social fabric. But there comes a point when it is no longer responsible to consume an outsized share of scarce public resources to provide subpar educational experiences in near-vacant schoolhouses.”

“Districts would be well advised to make closure decisions early and as judiciously as possible – and communicate to families how and why those decisions are made. Then comes the most important part: executing closure in a way that’s least disruptive for affected families. Done well, there is potential for students to land in better schools – and when this happens, students often fare better academically than they did in their former placements.”

“I have some personal experience with a promising approach to school closures in New Orleans, where my organization, EdNavigator, has done work since 2015. Families in closing schools there receive two critical pieces of support. First, students are given preferential treatment in the city’s open-enrollment system. Essentially, if a vacancy exists, a student from a closing school has the first opportunity to claim it. This preference increases the likelihood that a student will land in a desired school rather than being defaulted to whichever school has excess capacity, as happens in many districts. (In some cases, this means that students in low-performing closing schools end up getting shunted to other low-performing schools that might be next on the closure list themselves.)”

“Second, our navigators offer personalized counsel to families on which schools they should list on their application. This is particularly important because families did not choose to leave their current placements. It is unlikely they have been keeping tables on alternatives.”

“Research published in 2022 suggests these interventions make a difference. Families requested and were assigned to higher-performing schools than students in comparison groups, and they were more likely to remain in those placements over time. Initial results for student learning showed improvement in both reading and math during the first year students attended their new schools.”

“My advice to cities grappling with failing enrollment is to being planning now. Engage in robust processes to take community input on which schools will close and when. But do not drag your feet hoping for a miracle that saves you from the scourge of closures altogether. That miracle is not coming. Instead, invest your time and resources in helping families transition, as New Orleans has done. Give families a real voice in determining their child’s new placement – and offer assistance in the pursuit of seats in charter schools, as well as traditional district schools. Moments like these are not the time to resurrect fruitless district-charter wars. Then, follow students closely as they acclimate to new buildings to ensure they aren’t lost in the shuffle, that their social work and special education services transfer seamlessly, that they make new friends.”

“The pandemic has already done enough harm to our children, in and out of school. Mismanaging the response to enrollment shortfalls that show no signs of abating will only make matters worse.”

When I worked in a large urban school district in Texas, closing schools was one of the worse problems we faced as school leaders. We tried Daly’s idea of allowing families from closing schools to choose the new school they wanted to attend. The problem was our district, and I’m guessing most urban districts around the country, didn’t have enough “good” schools to send kids to from closing schools. So, as Daly warns, our district fell into a cyclical trap of closing a school, and then sending those kids to a under-performing school that was probably going to be on the next closure list.

I think the solution is to give families more options than just a set of schools inside a traditional district. Choices of charters, learning pods, microschools, and other learning organizations should be considered as options when telling a family their neighborhood school is closing.

What doesn’t work is kicking the can down the road, allowing under enrolled and usually low-performing schools to remain open. That doesn’t help anyone – especially the young learner.

Til tomorrow. SVB