When Chicago closed 50 public schools in 2013, school and city officials framed the decision not only as a choice about budget deficits or half-empty buildings but as a way to give kids a “brighter future.”
Like Cleveland’s school board and officials, they argued that students would reap benefits from the tough decision through added resources and programs that would lead to academic gains.
But in Chicago, that didn’t happen. On top of the confusion and emotional turbulence for students and teachers in the wake of the closures, research later showed that academic impacts were kind of a wash.
The same research recommended that, in the future, districts should add emotional and academic supports as soon as closures are announced. It also found that if districts respect how students and staff feel and ensures that their new schools feel physically and emotionally welcoming, there’s more bandwidth to focus on teaching and learning.
Similar to Cleveland’s plan to merge schools, in Chicago there was an effort to keep students and teachers together by assigning them to “welcoming schools,” though not all students attended those schools. (Chicago’s closures included 49 elementary schools and one high school.)
At first, the district poured resources into welcoming new students, purchasing iPads, adding learning programs and sprucing up libraries — the total spent was around $180 million. But local news outlets in Chicago later documented that the district failed to sustain these resources over time.
Researchers from the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research, which studied many aspects of the closures, later found that academic gains only materialized for a slim sliver of students while many others fell behind due to the upheaval of the closures and transitions.
Marisa de la Torre was one of those researchers. She underscored that some students — those who went to very high performing schools – did see academic improvements, but most didn’t.
“The difference between the closed and the welcoming school wasn’t dramatically different,” she said.
Students who headed to new welcoming schools and those who already attended them both saw their test scores drop.
For students whose schools closed, the impacts started in the year the district debated and decided which schools would close. By the spring of that school year, as the transition loomed, students had fallen about one and a half months behind in reading and two months behind in math compared to their peers at other schools. Their reading scores eventually bounced back, but it took two school years for that to happen, and it took four years for their math scores to catch up.
Students who already attended the welcoming school saw short-term drops in their reading and math scores in that first school year, but they rebounded more quickly.
These findings, which were in line with similar studies, prompted researchers to recommend that students get more support starting in the year a school closure is announced. Those supports included things like more school psychologists and counselors along with special training for teachers and administrators and long-term funding for academic help.
Over time, the outcomes for students whose schools closed lagged behind their peers. Researchers found that students who were in the third through fifth grades when their schools closed were likely to experience slightly lower grade point averages over time, which the researchers found worrying because it is grades, not test scores, that are predictive of whether a student will graduate high school.
Chicago’s public radio station, WBEZ, analyzed data for students from schools that were in the graduating class of 2022 — kids who would have been in the third grade the year their school was closed — and found that students graduated high school below the city-wide average. (Closures didn’t necessarily hurt their chances of graduating, they just didn’t do any better than other students who attended schools in the district with similar demographics and challenges.)
Most mergers combined similar schools
Tricey Robinson’s children attended Overton Elementary until it closed and they transitioned to Mollison Elementary a few blocks away.
Mollison had initially been considered for closure, but as school officials whittled the list of schools to be closed from 330 to 50, it survived. In many ways it was very similar to Overton: the school had a majority Black student body, many of its families had lower incomes, and it ranked among the lowest performing schools citywide.
It also had an engaged parent association and dedicated principal who had worked hard to improve academic performance at the school, and test scores had been steadily increasing over the years.
But they dropped sharply during the 2013-2014 school year, when an influx of students and staff from Overton led to overcrowded classrooms and tensions between teachers.
“I feel like, when they closed them schools, they stole a lot of resources from our kids, and they then [didn’t] want to give our kids the help that they needed,” Robinson recalled.
At the time, parents from Mollison brought their concerns about the dip in test scores to Chicago’s school board. They pointed out that the board had consolidated two struggling schools where kids already needed more support and that the overcrowding and chaos wasn’t helping them.
As one Mollison parent put it, the district’s formula “doesn’t work for students who are struggling.”
That experience was indicative of another key issue: Unless students moved to top-performing schools, their academic performance either experienced temporary dips or stayed the same.
In Chicago, most of the mergers looked something like the merger between Overton and Mollison. Where the two schools were in the same achievement tier but the welcoming schools’ test scores were marginally better. A much smaller number of welcoming schools were considered “top performing,” and only about a fifth of students from closed schools attended those schools.
About a third of students chose not to attend the “welcoming” schools the district picked for them, instead opting for schools closer to where they lived. That meant that some students ended up in schools that had worse academic track records — including schools that had scores so low CPS had placed them on “probation.”
Cleveland school’s CEO Warren Morgan has underscored that students here will benefit from the consolidations through added college courses, career pathways and elective classes at their new schools. He’s also touted that 96% of students at closed schools will attend a designated welcoming school that has the same or higher rating on state report cards. The district has also promised extra support for transportation, student safety and culture building.
Signal Cleveland compared the state report card ratings of Cleveland schools that are closing with their paired welcoming school. The picture looks very similar to Chicago. The vast majority of students, under the district’s plan, would go to schools with the same rating. A handful will go to schools that are slightly better rated. An even smaller number will go to schools that are much higher rated.
Then there’s the question of whether students will attend welcoming schools the district picked for them. As of Feb. 13, only a fifth of the 4,000 students who will be uprooted by closures had indicated they will go to their assigned school. The rest are either going elsewhere or haven’t yet told the district where they plan to enroll.
It will take months to know where Cleveland students end up and years to know how the closures will change their academic futures. For now, the unanswered question remains: Can the district translate its promises into real gains for students?
Suggested Reading
A warning for Cleveland? Crowded classes and frayed trust marked the year after Chicago school closures
Chicago’s decision to close 50 schools was followed by a year of confusion, lost records, overcrowding and academic backsliding for some students.
Transforming closed Cleveland schools won’t be easy. Just ask Chicago
In 2013, Chicago closed 50 schools and struggled to reuse the buildings. Cleveland now faces the same test.