As this story in the Wall Street Journal shows, over 1,000 public schools closed last year, involving some 280,000 students.
This is supposedly the result of competition. But it seems clear that in some districts, like DC, Chicago, and NYC, the leaders of the public schools are supporting the other team. How can you have competition when the home team has leaders cheering for and helping the other side?
Why doesn’t KIPP accept the KIPP Challenge and take over all of DC?
SCHOOLS RING CLOSING BELL
By STEPHANIE BANCHERO
WASHINGTON—At Davis Elementary in this city’s mostly poor southeast section, 178 students are spread out in a 69-year-old building meant to hold 450.
Three miles away, the new, $30 million KIPP charter school teems with 1,050 children. Toddlers crawl over a state-of-the-art jungle gym and older students fill brightly decorated classrooms. A waiting list holds 2,000 names.
Many students who live within the Davis boundaries instead attend the charter school, one of 125 nationwide run by KIPP, a nonprofit. The exodus helped land Davis on a list of 20 schools targeted for closure next school year.
Closing underused schools, however painful, will let the district shift resources to “improve the quality of education we provide to our students,” Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said at a recent city council hearing packed with parents, teachers and students pleading for schools to be kept open.
Similar scenes are playing out in places such as Tucson, Ariz., Chicago and Philadelphia, where school systems are rolling out plans to close underenrolled and underperforming facilities. The efforts are driven by a drop in the school-age population, the Obama administration’s push to shut poor-performing schools and competition from charters, the publicly funded schools run by independent groups.
During the 2010-11 school year, school districts nationwide closed 1,069 traditional public schools, uprooting nearly 280,000 students, according to data compiled for The Wall Street Journal by the National Center for Education Statistics, the primary federal entity for national school data. That was up from 717 closings affecting 193,000 students in 2000-01, according to the data, which don’t include specialized schools, such as those for special-education students.
Even charters aren’t immune. In 2010-11, 128 charter schools were closed, compared with 44 in 2000-01, the data show. This past week, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, a nonprofit group that represents government and other entities that approve charter-school applications, called on its members to close hundreds of poor-performing charters and urged new state laws to improve accountability. The group said at least 900 of the nation’s 6,000 charters, which also receive private donations, post test scores that land them in the bottom 15% of all schools in their states.
“We did not start this movement to create more bad schools,” said Greg Richmond, president of the group. “We want smarter charter-school growth and stronger accountability.”
Proponents of school choice say closing low-performing and underenrolled campuses is a natural outgrowth of heathy competition, while many teacher unions argue that struggling schools often need more resources to fairly compete. Meanwhile, many parents fear that closures will mean students end up in schools that are farther away or worse academically.
Tubrook Livingston, who has a child at Davis Elementary and heads its Parent Teacher Association, said he recognizes the school is underenrolled and low-performing, but he wants it kept open. “Unless they have a better place for our kids…I don’t see any reason to close it,” he said.
In Chicago, rumors that the city intended to close as many as 100 schools laid the foundation for the two-week teachers strike in September and sparked rallies protesting the closings and prompted protests citywide. Facing a Saturday deadline, city officials lobbied state legislators last week to allow a delay in identifying schools targeted for closure. State lawmakers granted the extension and the governor signed the bill Friday. Chicago schools officials have said they will implement a five-year moratorium on closings after next year’s schools closings.
In Washington, enrollment in district-run schools has dropped to about 42,000 this year from about 61,000 in 2002, due partly to the city’s dwindling school-age population and the growing popularity of charter schools. About 40% of D.C. public-school students now attend charters.
Research is scant on the academic impact of school closings. But two studies—one in Chicago and one in an unnamed district in the Northeast—found that, in general, students displaced by closures do no better, and sometimes worse, in other traditional schools, in large part because they transfer to similarly low-performing campuses nearby.
Closing schools doesn’t necessarily yield a financial windfall, because teachers often are shuffled to other schools and vacant school buildings are tough to unload, according to a 2011 study by Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia Research Initiative. “There is nothing easy about closing schools and it is extremely difficult to find productive uses for the buildings,” said Emily Dowdall, a senior researcher at Pew.
Still, underused schools like Davis, which has students from preschool through fifth grade, can be expensive to operate. Davis Elementary spends about $13,225 a pupil, with about 32% going toward classroom teachers, and the rest funding such things as instructional aides, office staff and custodians. Nearby Langdon Elementary, with more than twice as many students, spends $9,900 a pupil, with 55% going to classroom teachers.
“We get that we are small and it’s not cost effective to run a small school, but we have a good thing going here and our students are making great progress,” said Davis’s principal, Maisha Riddlesprigger.
Since 2009, the portion of Davis students who tested proficient in reading doubled to 34%, while math proficiency jumped to 35% from 22%. At the nearby KIPP school, 59% are proficient in reading and 75% in math.
Nichole Young lives a few blocks from Davis but sends her 4-year-old son to KIPP. “I don’t have anything against Davis,” said Ms. Young, who teaches 12th grade English in a Maryland public school. “But we visited KIPP and observed the children in classes and they seemed so happy to be learning and that won me over.”
Write to Stephanie Banchero at stephanie.banchero@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared December 3, 2012, on page A3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Schools Ring Closing Bell.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The huge problem here is not the fact that School X is closing; rather, it’s the public policy choices that are causing the massive closings.
In this regard, I feel like the kid in the “emperor has no clothes” story.
The Washington, DC govt (like many big-city govts) is opening charters; some parents enroll their children in the charters instead of the neighborhood schools; as parents enroll their children in charters, there are fewer children left in the neighborhood schools; the city then closes the neighborhood schools due to underenrollment in the neighborhood schools.
Charters always enroll via application. Therefore, if a child’s parents are too unconcerned or too dysfunctional to complete the application process (and, in most cases, provide daily tranportation to the charter), that child will attend the neighborhood school. Similarly, if a child’s parents are sufficiently concerned/functional to enroll the child in a charter but the child proves to be a “problem” student, particularly a behavior problem, the child will be transferred back to the neighborhood school.
This is a ratchet effect whereby over time an increasing percentage of students in the neighborhood schools will either have unconcerned/dysfunctional parents and/or be “problem” students. It will — on average — be much harder to teach these students than the children of the concerned/functional parents who are attending the charters. The neighborhood schools will, accordingly, become more chaotic. This, in turn, will encourage more of the concerned/functional parents to enroll their children in the charters. Enrollment in the neighborhood schools will fall and more neighborhood schools will close.
This is a vicious cycle that will eventually result in all of the well-behaved children of concerned/functional parents attending charters and all of the children of the unconcerned/dysfunctional parents as well as the poorly-behaved children of the concerned/functional parents attending the neighborhood schools. Little/no learning will occur in those neighborhood schools and society will eventually pay the price in terms of school dropouts, teenage mothers, adults condemned forwever to low-wage jobs or unemplyment, more crime, and more $ spent on prisons.
Instead of creating charters that enable the concerned/functional parents to escape the chaotic neighborhood schools, the DC govt (and other big-city govts) should eliminate the charters and instead implement reforms in the neighborhoods addressing the school-based (as opposed to societal) problems that cause the concerned/functional parents to flee the neighorhood schools — i.e., minor but endemic misbehavior and many students reading far below grade level.
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How can a school district, Washington, D.C., with about $29,000/student not ensure education of their students? This has to be planned to be a failure. There is no other way this can happen. It is not for a lack of resources unless they plan the failure for another agenda which are charter schools. Now if you are a charter school and receive that amount of funding there is a lot of profit to make. What does everyone think charter schools are about? It is not that they love the children. At LAUSD over the last 20 years I have never seen a charter school promoter ever at the Board of Education for all the children. What does this say? Charter schools have no accountability whatsoever. For instance you do not have a right to look at their financial records and yet they are publically funded. I suggest that you read the Stanford Study on Charter Schools which does not show them to be high performers. In fact, if you apply the “Correction Factor” to allow for charter schools not having to follow much ed code or local regulations, cherry picking parents and students, not dealing with behavioral problems, ESL and special education they do not do well at all in general. An example is Yvonne Chan’s Vaughn Street Learning Center established about 1994 in Pacoima. Today after 18 years her API scores are only about 710 after 18 years of being celebrated as an educational expert and having served on the California State Board of Education. This is a loser as Compton has elementary API scores of 800-900 and Inglewood about 800 without charter schools. Also, read the latest DOE OIG report on the total lack of accountability of charter schools in Florida, Arizona and California with LAUSD being named. This report is ED-OIG/A02L0002. Then tell me how good charter schools are and how accountable they are. Have a good day.
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You really should not cut and paste entire copyrighted articles without permission of the owner, especially from websites that charge for content. You could get sued…
“Free Republic, LLC, owner of the political website freerepublic.com, was found liable for copyright infringement in L.A. Times v. Free Republic for reproducing and archiving full-text versions of plaintiffs’ news articles even though the judge found the website minimally commercial. She held that “while defendants’ do not necessarily ‘exploit’ the articles for commercial gain, their posting to the Free Republic site allows defendants and other visitors to avoid paying the ‘customary price’ charged for the works.”
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Ms. Ravitch:Your take on Richard Laine of P-20 Councils. Kinda creepy not sure why.
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