Peter Greene here takes apart the claim by Mike Petrilli and Aaron Churchill of the Fordham Institute in the Wall Street Journal that closing schools is good for students. By good, they mean that the students will get higher test scores if their school is closed and they move to a different school.
Greene calls this “four kinds of wrong.”
To begin with:
“Before we even get into what they said or why it’s baloney, let’s open with the caveat that they themselves left out of the article. The study looks at the benefits of closing schools and was done in Ohio, where the Fordham operates charters that directly benefit from the closing schools. So this is, once again, a study touting the benefits of cigarette smoking brought to you by your friends at the Tobacco Institute.”
They claim that students gain an extra 49 days by switching schools. No serious researcher, he says, uses this metric. It is a meaningless reformer extrapolation, Greene says.
He adds, an increase from the 20th to the 22nd or 23rd percentile is a statistical blip.
Worst of all, they propose destroying social capital, which children need even more than a few points on a standardized test.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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The research on school closings consistently finds that forcibly closing public schools is bad for the children who attended those schools. Interesting that the “tobacco industry” finds smoking is good for you.
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I’m genuinely curious: can you provide any links to this research?
In New York City, schools are closed in a phase-out process that means any child who wants to attend a closing school through its terminal grade can, and new schools are simultaneously phased in in the same building.
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“It cuts the child loose from a community support system while hollowing out the heart of that community. It tells us something about the expectations of American public schooling that we never used to say “community schools” for the same reason we don’t order “wet water” in a restaurant. A community base is the foundation of US public education.”
That’s the big picture and of course really important but the part that amazes me is there’s no recognition that children form relationships WITH OTHER CHILDREN.
Their relationships don’t matter, at all? They can just be scattered to the wind willy-nilly and their personal lives don’t change at all? These sets of human beings they encounter and come to know are just interchangeable?
ADULTS have enormous trouble with radical change in relationships in the workplace. Children don’t? They’re just solo fliers?
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We’re building a new public school to replace a public school that was built in 1905. People in the community want the bricks from the school that will be torn down. Anyone who wants one will get one.
I guess we could have insisted this school means nothing to them, but since that obviously isn’t true and they’re paying for the new school we decided not to stubbornly DENY what they told us and dismiss them as a “political” problem.
Is that what “political” problem means now? The peril that comes with completely ignoring the clear, expressed wishes of the public? Because if it is I would suggest ed reformers have a bigger problem than “politics”.
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Public schools are the bedrock of democracy, where children learn to be citizens.
Bedrock for corporate terror-reformers is just something they’re hell bent to frack.
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They never valued public schools to begin with. No one would be this reckless with something they valued. They don’t see risk because they never assigned any value at the outset.
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Public schools and public libraries are the most democratizing influences in our country. Too bad the deformers fail to understand this. Their tinkering and manipulations harm the most vulnerable poor students, and it allows billionaires to twist curricula and learning objectives. I can think of potential bias such as conservative Christian views, a conservative slant to history, denial of climate change, and gun rights. Privatized schools can lend themselves as a bully pulpit on these issues while most public schools would tend to be more balanced.
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Agree, Chiara. Sorry, retired teacher, I think deformers do understand this, Consider the source: WSJ: I’d love to actually read the article & comment there, but they want 1$/wk for the privilege, a price middle-classers cannot afford to add to water, sewer, etc utilities, so they remain an echo chamber of well-heeled conservatives who care only for feathering their retirement nests at the expense of current middle-classers. Presumably they either have no grandchildren, or if they do, ensure they’re ensconced either in cushy privates or cheap-o religious schools; there you have today’s WSJ readership [thanks, Murdoch].
More likely, they [WSJ readers & other deformers] are like my long-deceased grandfather, who ‘pulled himself up by his own bootstraps’ during an era when it was possible to do so [pre-Depression], & had only scorn for others who weren’t able to do the same.
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“retired teacher
April 29, 2015 at 1:37 pm
Public schools and public libraries are the most democratizing influences in our country.”
I’m curious about how they constantly invoke “politics!” as if that settles the matter.
“That’s just….. POLITICS”
We had 3 different plans for the new school. Two of them failed – voters didn’t pass the levy. The plan was modified and they voted for it. There were meetings campaigns, yard signs, angry letters to the editor, the whole works. .I don’t know- is that “politics” Can that process just be dismissed as simply too much trouble?
I get that it isn’t efficient. Is it supposed to be efficient?
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“Democracy is too much trouble.” This seems to be the view of several of the oligarchs. They believe their considerable wealth should entitle them to circumvent democratic process. Notice how the charter movement tries to put the power in the hands of a complicit mayor or governor. They don’t want to hear from the people. When they do, in protest, they want to ignore them.
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Well said and great last session Sunday at the NPE conference.
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The Reformers will keep repeating this until the public believes it is true.
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