Question for Researchers about School Closings

June 28, 2014 //

Does anyone know an authoritative source for the number of public schools closed because of NCLB and Race to the Top? Either turnarounds, turned over to charters, or just closed?

Categories Closing schools, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

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Lloyd Lofthouse says:

June 28, 2014 at 4:31 pm

Maybe these pages on this one site offer the answer you may be looking for:

From school year 1999–2000 to 2011–12, the percentage of all public schools that were public charter schools increased from 1.7 to 5.8 percent, and the total number of public charter schools increased from 1,500 to 5,700. In addition to increasing in number, charter schools have generally increased in enrollment size over time. From school year 1999–2000 to 2011–12, the number of students enrolled in public charter schools increased from 0.3 million to 2.1 million students. During this period, the percentage of public school students who attended charter schools increased from 0.7 to 4.2 percent. Between school years 2010–11 and 2011–12, the number of students enrolled in public charter schools increased from 1.8 million to 2.1 million.

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=30

Some choice among public schools was available to 46 percent of students in 2007, according to their parents’ reports. Public school choice was available to a greater percentage of students in the West (55 percent) and Midwest (55 percent) than those in the South (41 percent) and Northeast (33 percent), and to a greater percentage of students in cities (52 percent) than those in the suburbs (40 percent). No measurable differences were detected among racial/ethnic groups in terms of parents’ reports of having a choice among public schools for their children.

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=6

In 2010–11, there were about 13,600 public school districts (source) with over 98,800 public schools, including about 5,300 charter schools (source). In 2011–12, there were about 30,900 private schools offering kindergarten or higher grades (source).

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

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Laura H. Chapman says:

June 28, 2014 at 4:52 pm

The causes of public school closings are more difficult to track than the actual closings. And the number of closings alone is problematic because new schools open.
Here is the link to information from USDE on school closings, by type of school and year. Just found it so I have not munched on it. . http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=619
Your own blog is a rich source of information for data mining on causes.

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- Laura H. Chapman says:
  
  June 28, 2014 at 4:58 pm
  
  I note that you do not seem to have a category for this topic, but some are likely to be more fertile than others. I am not confident that reasons for the causes will reach beyond those already well-documented in your books, Mercedes Schneider’s book and works by others who have been tracked the attacks.
  
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- dianeravitch says:
  
  June 28, 2014 at 5:44 pm
  
  Thank you, that is helpful.
  
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- 2old2teach says:
  
  June 28, 2014 at 8:21 pm
  
  It looks like charter data was included in the general data. #5 footnote confused me.
  
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Daun Kauffman says:

June 28, 2014 at 5:20 pm

Great question ! No clear answer here in (one city) Philadelphia a very slippery issue . . .

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Donna says:

June 28, 2014 at 6:10 pm

How about the number of public schools closed, charters specifically opened in their place, and then the number of charters that closed because they sucked.

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james miller says:

June 28, 2014 at 7:01 pm

yes there is such a source:JOURNEY for JUSTICE ALLIANCE REPORT:DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS:RACISM,SCHOOL CLOSURES,and PUBLIC SCHOOL SABOTAGE.There is a map that shows school closings by cities,dates,and numbers.it will shock you and most people.
i am doing a two hour ,in-dept,radio talk show on this issue with some of the organizations and people fighting these closures in chicago,new orleans,and newark on my show THE WAR REPORT ON PUBLIC EDUCATION.the show will air live on sunday june 29th at 2pm pst on bbsradio.com/thewarreport

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2old2teach says:

June 28, 2014 at 8:12 pm

We know that inevitably every school would have been considered failing under NCLB. Political expediency required a change in program. It was much smarter to design a program, RTTT, that would target schools in poorer communities. It really has kept a lot of shenanigans under the radar because they haven’t impacted wealthier communities to the same extent. The first big mistake was in NY; it was really incredibly arrogant for the state to assume that highly educated suburbanites were going to accept that their children were failing because PARCC said so. I doubt the state would have ever thought of using those scores to close schools in historically high performing suburban areas. They needed to be much more subtle. Perhaps the reformers are realizing their mistake as demonstrated by the reformer calls for a moratorium on testing.

Even so, data driven management has entered higher socioeconomic school systems. How many school board members come out of the business community who think that a business model should extend into the classroom? There is a fascination with comparing scores with other districts or schools whose differences reveal little about the education being offered.

In any case, I think it would probably take a grass roots effort to collect information district by district. I can see some districts being highly obstructionist when it comes to releasing data about mandated school closings. Chicago would probably hide behind claiming that some schools were underutilized, but I am sure there are sources outside of “official” channels. There must be other creative ways to cloud the data, but not everyone can have a hurricane.

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Marianne Giannis says:

June 28, 2014 at 8:58 pm

In our district, a neighborhood middle school that had been in existence for over 90 years was closed due to budget cuts and because it supposedly required over 12 million dollars in repairs. Over 650 students were sent to other middle schools in the district.

A year and a half later, the building is being reopened as a second campus for one of the charter schools (a STEM k-8 school) in the district.

There is no mention anymore of the previous school or the supposed $12 million dollars in repairs. It just all went away.

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heartoserve says:

June 28, 2014 at 10:09 pm

Aloha Diane:

Is any way you can list all the blog topics for the day in one email…you are overloading my inbox…I spend a good half hour cleaning up emails..when one stop shopping daily at your blog site will do.. Mahalo

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- dianeravitch says:
  
  June 28, 2014 at 10:35 pm
  
  Stephanie, I don’t know how to send all emails in one post, especially since I try to add newsworthy items.
  
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  - Lloyd Lofthouse says:
    
    June 28, 2014 at 11:16 pm
    
    I looked at them all every morning. If they were in a list, I might skip some. I think it is better to keep it like it is. Every morning is a shot in the arm to keep the simmering anger boiling—-it energizes me to stay in the fight.
  - Pedagogy or Bust says:
    
    June 29, 2014 at 10:15 am
    
    I chose the recipient setting for one email per day. I may not receive them as they break, but I can peruse them all in one pass. Check out the link at the bottom of your email under ‘manage subscriptions’
  - tedaltenberg says:
    
    June 29, 2014 at 11:52 am
    
    I DO get your (Diane’s) posts in a “digest” email, all at once. Login to your account at wordpress.com (where Diane’s blog is hosted) and you can manage your blog subscriptions there, including setting it to receive daily digests rather than individual emails. (“Pedagogy or Bust” and Christine Langhoff already mentioned this, sorry…)
    
    And while we are on the topic, I must congratulate you and profess my amazement that you post a dozen or so a day! Is this ALL you’re doing now these days: constantly scouring the web and reading and blogging? Wow…
    
    I hope your recovery is going well, Diane, and that you get time to take gentle walks and do other things. I know you said a while ago you’ll be traveling less, but I’m hoping maybe we’ll see you at the AFT convention in LA in a couple weeks. Keep up the good fight, Diane!
  - dianeravitch says:
    
    June 29, 2014 at 2:50 pm
    
    Thanks, Ted, I am recuperating, have time to read and blog. I keep promising to limit myself to no more than five posts a day, but people send me great articles from everywhere, and you notice that I often turn comments into posts.
    
    The recuperation has been slower than I expected. There is pain every day. I go to PT three times a week. I try to exercise the knee every day. I swim. The physical therapist promises I will see a change soon. I hope so. I have gone from a walker to a cane to being able to walk on two legs, but not easily. I do what I think of as a Frankenstein walk. Sort of stiff.
    
    Life lessons. Watch your step. Hold the handrail.
  - 2old2teach says:
    
    June 29, 2014 at 8:55 pm
    
    Just keep fighting, Diane. You need to get healthy for you. It’s a little harder to enjoy life when moving is a battle, but from your own report you are improving even if it still hurts like **!! You have gone from reliance on six legs to three legs and now to two even if you don’t totally “own” them yet.
- Christine Langhoff says:
  
  June 28, 2014 at 11:54 pm
  
  Change your subscription so that you get one email a day. You can do this by going to “manage” under the heading “Follow this blog” at the bottom of the page. You’ll get one link once a day. Our Diane is quite prolific! ; )
  
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teachingeconomist says:

June 29, 2014 at 12:29 am

I think it will be difficult to determine why a school is closed. By all accounts the traditional zoned school in Walton Kansas was going to be closed because of low attendance (the town of Walton has 235 citizens). Converting it to a charter school kept the school open. How should the Walton School count in the tally?

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David-S says:

June 29, 2014 at 7:47 am

EVERY TRADITIONAL HIGH SCHOOL IN THE Bronx, NY EXCEPT for Bronx Science has been either closed and renamed, reorganized or broken into multiple small schools ( where the inexperienced newly minted principals argue over resources). There are no more vocational schools as we know them, Theodore Roosevelt, James Monroe, etc, all gone (except for the ‘building name’ engraved over the main entrance). The last graduating classes had kids deprived of a proper, varied, enriched, high school experience.

Christopher Columbus High School just had it’s ‘last voyage’ Friday. The event had about 300 former graduates, staff, etc. One graduate from the early 1940’s attended. Incredibly sad.

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Naked Teaching (@ShirleyWill3) says:

June 29, 2014 at 11:24 am

Statistics published by the National Alliance For Public Charter Schools, while suspect given their origins, still are useful as they reveal a chilling trend. The narrative summary is also cold, leaving out entirely what happens to the children when schools of any type are closed.

Quoted from the PDF: “The National Alliance promotes meeting the demand for high-quality school options and encouraging well-planned school openings, as well as authorizing, setting and enforcing high performance standards. The failure to meet these standards must conclude with school closure to ensure the sector is providing the best options to families across the country.”

The shift in number of students from public school to charter schools and subsequent (real) public school closures correlates rather nicely, if not exactly with a one to one correspondence.

See detail at:

Click to access New-and-Closed-Report-February-20141.pdf

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English Teacher in California says:

June 29, 2014 at 1:24 pm

LAUSD lists 249Charters under its Charter school division. I haven’t had the patience to count how many of them are conversion schools – which means that the teachers have voted to convert them. Not all of the conversions are independent, however.

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Joe Prichard says:

June 29, 2014 at 7:24 pm

my nephew’s wife, Sarah Reckhow, author of Follow the Money. which dealt with how foundations are spending money to influence public school policies, told me she was working on a book about state takeovers of schools, which is a related subject. she and my nephew, Matt Grossmann, were the people who told me to start paying attention to you….they gave me your book for Christmas. Whatever Sarah is doing, you can count on it being well researched…..she sets a gold standard, and reaction to her work proves it. She would probably be glad to hear from you.

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Ellen T Klock says:

June 29, 2014 at 11:53 pm

There are so many factors that go into the decision of closing a school, it is difficult to pin it on down just one. However, test scores are definitely one of the data points. Another is location, and I mean location as in the locations which give the least resistance to the idea of closing. School 12 had a lot of good qualities, but it was not a neighborhood school. It was easily closed and then reopened as an administrative building. It’s where parents go to sign their kids up to attend the Buffalo Public Schools. School 40 was one of the newer schools (cornerstone 1976) with a unique design, but the neighborhood was poor and not well organized. It also had a large special education population, so the low test scores did play a role. It was eventually reopened as an alternative middle school. Kensington High School, with its unique architecture, was a school known for its low achievements and unruly behavior. This broke my mom’s heart, since when she attended it was the best school in the city (competing with Bennett High School which is also in danger of closing for the same reasons). Kensington reopened as the new Frederick Law Olmsted High School, a gifted and talented 5-12 school often referred to as OAK (Olmsted at Kensington). Also heartbreaking was the closing of Seneca Vocational School after ninety nine years of service. It was reinvented as MST (Math Science Technology), a 7-12 school. Other factors besides behaviors and test scores include the condition of the buildings. However, almost all the currently used schools in the BPS have been renovated and upgraded taking advantage of state and federal funding.

So, Diane, schools are often closed, reconfigured, and reopened. Some buildings remain shuttered, some have been used as Swing Schools (buildings used by schools which were being renovated), some have become charter schools, some have been sold and bulldozed. Ironically, the schools are not the property of the BPS, but the city of Buffalo.

Can I give you a specific number of closures specifically due to test scores? No! But if the future trends continue, CCSS will force school closures in greater numbers. This year Bennett and the Martin Luther King School were targeted for closure, but given a years reprieve due to a change in leadership (and a lack of planning). Cuomo and King have threatened to close the International School (full of refugees) due to low test scores. So I’ll have to get back to you on that.

Ultimately, all the changes and re configurations ignores the true problem – what to do with the children who can’t succeed in the current style of education being offered.

Eventually the true education crisis has to be dealt with and not swept under the rug.

Instead of focusing on passing a test, how about using what has worked in the past, small class sizes, extra help, enrichment, specials, assemblies, field trips, any technique which gives the child a sense of ownership and success. The rest will then fall into place.

But then, I feel as if I am spitting in the wind even suggesting what should be so obvious.

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