Two articles, “School Closures Work if There are Better Schools for Students to go to, Study Finds” and “The School Choice Debate,” explores the relationship between school closure and student achievement as well as the debate on school choice.
The first article by Arianna Protheor discusses that closing poorly-performing schools and converting them into charter schools can improve student performance only under specific conditions. Using a new study published by the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University, she concludes that the most important factors is whether students end up in a better-performing schools after their original one was closed. This is because students who needed up in lower-performing schools did not have an overall positive effect on student achievement.18
The second article by Marc Tucker explains that the average performance of charter schools and regular public schools are about the same overall. Though it is argued that charters can offer better schools to urban-dwelling families than the regular public schools, the case of charters school producing signifiant gains for students is highly dependent on the kind and strength of the regulatory regime. This means that students will succeed only if you put a strong, wise regulatory regime in place. Even then, we should be cautious of the very feature of that regime that are intended to improve the performance of the schools of choice, which creates strong incentives to push out the students who are the most difficult or expensive to educate. Hence, Tucker warns us that we should not be surprised if average student performance decline and the gap between high performers and low performers increase with higher value placed on choice. Choice must ensure that student performance will not suffer overall and gaps in performance between low-income and high-income students are increased as little as possible.19
18. Arianna Prothero (Oct. 17, 2016). Education Week. Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/charterschoice/2016/10/school_closures_work_if_there_are_better_schools_for_students_to_go_to_study_finds.html
19. Marc Tucker (April 13, 2017) Education Week. Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2017/04/the_school_choice_debate.html