There’s a heated (verbal) battle going on around the country about school closures. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has made school turnarounds a central part of the Race to the Top, and several big-city superintendents are attempting to improve their schools by shutting down consistently poor-performing schools. As might be expected, the teachers and students in those schools, and their public advocates, are not taking it quietly.
What’s getting lost in this heated debate is that there are legitimate facts about the school turnaround process, facts that are being deliberately misconstrued by public advocates. Example A is Diane Ravitch, discussing the closing of 19 schools in New York City:
But let’s look at those numbers. For the past several years, with the support of the Gates Foundation, the city closed nearly 100 schools and opened more than 350 small ones. As large schools closed, the new small schools (and charter schools) that replaced them did not take a fair share of high-needs students, which enabled them to have better results. So the remaining large schools have disproportionate numbers of children with high needs—those who are homeless, low-performing, immigrants, non-English-speaking, or with extreme disabilities. With each new round of closures, other large schools are set up to fail.
This is a common meme in the anti-closure arguments–that small schools aren’t taking their fair share of under-privileged students, and so the remaining large schools suffer undue burdens to compensate–but, in New York City at least, it’s flat out wrong. A study last summer from the Center for New York City Affairs concluded that:
While some critics have suggested that the small schools “creamed” the large schools’ best students, especially in their early years, the center found that the small schools, on average, now enroll roughly the same proportion of students who could be described as at-risk of dropping out of the system as a whole. These include overage students, English-language learners, special education students, and students from very low-income families.
Ravitch herself cites the same report in her comments, but apparently she missed that line (it’s in the Executive Summary), and she also missed two pages of graphs showing this exact same thing. In fact, compared to citywide averages, small schools enroll slightly more overage students and special education students, slightly less ELL students, and way more low-income students.
I don’t claim to be in any position to speak intelligently on the two schools that Ravitch names in her post, but the data have something to say about the larger claims she’s making. And, contrary to her assertions, small schools perform better than medium and large ones in attendance, credit accumulation, and four- and six-year graduation rates. The differences are even more noticeable as student poverty rates increase (and if you don’t trust me, see the graphs on page 19 of the aforementioned report).
To those who point to the fact that six of the 19 schools slated for closure are small high schools created under Klein as evidence against the small-school movement, it seems to me like it’s actually evidence of the contrary: the DOE is consistently closing down poor schools, no matter what they look like or how big they are, and this has nothing to do with ideology or privatization.
Turning around chronically under-performing schools is not an easy process. Closing schools is one option that should be on the table, and it seems to be producing positive results in New York City. It won’t work every time, and it certainly has attendant consequences, but the claims some opponents are making are a bit off base.
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.
The NYC small high school graduation rates reflect the first few years without special education and ELL students, and, highly questionable methods of accumulating credit, i.e., credit recovery, are commonplace in small schools. Graduation rates in years five, and six are declining. The bottom line is that school structure is not a “sticky” reform, small schools over time begin to look like small large high schools, it’s only when instruction and collaboration become embedded in school cultures that we see progress.
Leonie: The report mentioned in the post, from 2009, says, “The first generation of small schools opened under Chancellor Klein were exempted from taking special education students and English-language learners (ELL) on the theory that the new schools wouldn’t be able to properly serve students with special instructional needs until they had reached their full enrollment. This exemption, however, was met with public anger, and the Department of Education reversed its policy. The new small schools are now required to serve any student assigned to them. The bar chart below shows that, on average, small and large schools are now serving similar shares of at-risk students…”
A 2004 report from Policy Studies Associates highlighted how the phasing out of large schools in New York City caused increased pressure on the host or neighboring large schools, “as …many “at risk” and special education students excluded from these schools, flooded other schools nearby.”
This “collateral damage” was conclusively shown by the recent report cited above:
“As the city closed large troubled high schools and opened small schools in their place, thousands of students, most of whom had low levels of academic achievement were diverted to the remaining large schools in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn. Enrollment increased at three-quarters of those schools, while attendance and graduation rates declined at more than 40 percent of the remaining large schools in those three boroughs.”
The Independent Budget Office of NYC released a report showing how most of the schools now slated for closure were far more overcrowded by DOE sending them these students five years ago, when the entering ninth graders entered the school whose lower four year graduate rate is now the excuse to close them down.
Moreover, Jennifer Jennings and Aaron Pallas have found that the level of need is indeed much higher at the remaining large schools than the small schools that took their place. The smaller schools had far fewer special education and ELL students, fewer males, fewer overage students, and more students proficient in English or math. Moreover, they also found that “As the new small schools mature, these differences do not shrink, and in some cases may even increase.”
I’m not sure you’re making a fair comparison between small schools and medium/large schools in New York. The report is rather explicit in the interpretative sections that many of the differentials across the different school types are largely attributable to the massive influx of needy students that larger schools absorbed in the wake of closure, many of which were ill-equipped to accommodate and serve them (CCSR documented a similar pattern in Chicago, and this report has a nice infographic of the negative externalities of these closures on page 41).
Also, importantly, and the report only glancingly touches on this in its discussion of different diploma types, its entirely conceivable that how “content knowledge” (read inconsistent grading standards) is conceptualized varies widely across the different school types. This will certainly distort the comparisons you make.