Last week, the state designated Fenway High School and two other public schools in Boston as “schools of recognition” — an honor reserved for only a few dozen high-performing schools statewide.
One of the district’s own assessments of the high school of about 400 students in Mission Hill, though, is more mixed. In the rubric the district has developed to guide school closure, merger, and reconfiguration decisions in the years ahead, Fenway flunks one of the three main criteria because its 1925-vintage building doesn’t offer a “continuum of services,” which the district says includes “appropriate support spaces, classroom number and size, accessibility and location of classrooms and support spaces.”
Overall school enrollment in Boston is declining and there’s widespread recognition that the city needs to close some facilities — both to get kids out of schools that are too under-enrolled to sustain the classes and services they deserve, and to reinvest financial savings into the classroom. Mayor Michelle Wu and Superintendent Mary Skipper both say closing, consolidating, and restructuring schools is a priority.
But the divergent assessments of Fenway High School point to how difficult it may be to translate that broad goal into specific school-by-school decisions.
Advertisement
Would the district seriously consider closing a school that the state has honored for its performance, or risk disrupting its success by merging it or moving it to a different building? Conversely, would it really leave open a struggling school just because it’s in a newer building?
In theory, the answer to both questions is yes. Currently, the district’s rubric for evaluating schools does not directly consider academic performance. According to Skipper, the district’s focus is on buildings themselves. “What we’re trying to look at with this lens is, where are there schools that they can’t even possibly reach [our] benchmark, because the facility itself is the barrier?” she told the Globe editorial board.
There is some pragmatic appeal to the district’s approach. Building conditions are generally objective and clear: a school either has enough classrooms or it doesn’t; it’s either complaint with the Americans with Disabilities Act or not. Closing a school because of poor academic performance can also feel punitive and arouse pushback from teachers and students who feel they’ve been blamed or labeled failures. Given the strong emotions that school closings tend to provoke, there’s a political logic to choosing criteria that are facilities-based.
Advertisement
And one of the district’s criteria does indirectly reflect academic performance. A school’s utilization rate — the measure of how many of its seats are filled — reflects to some extent how desirable the school is in the city’s school choice system. Educational quality is one of the factors that often influences families’ selections.
But failing to take academic outcomes more explicitly into account also ignores what experts who’ve studied school closures in other cities have concluded. Closing schools shouldn’t just be a cost-savings exercise; it should result in better educational experiences for all students affected so that their sacrifice is worthwhile. And to make school closures raise academic performance, researchers say, districts need to be intentional about closing weaker schools and moving students to higher-performing ones.
Margaret Raymond at Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which conducted a 26-state study of closures in 2017, said one of the lessons was clear: “Close all the bad schools,” she said in an interview with the Globe editorial board, and move their students to higher-achieving schools.
The CREDO study suggested that for many students, transferring to a new school neither hurt nor helped them — but for those who transferred from a bad school to a better school, there were noticeable positive impacts.
Others echo that view.
“What we find in Philadelphia is when you move students to schools serving higher-achieving peers, that tends to mediate any adverse impacts from moving them,” said Matthew P. Steinberg, an education economist who analyzed the closure of about 10 percent of Philadelphia’s schools in the early 2010s.
Advertisement
That’s not to say Skipper should throw out the rubric the district developed, with its emphasis on bricks-and-mortar evaluations. But as the process unfolds, the district should be clear that it won’t ignore academic performance in its decisions.
Districts that have gone through the school closure process offer other lessons for Boston, too.
Chicago closed 50 schools in 2013 — a divisive saga for the city that’s often held up as a case study in how not to close schools. Test scores fell for students from both closed and receiving schools, and while reading scores recovered quickly, the setback for math was more long-lasting. Graduation rates didn’t improve for students from closed schools.
Chicago’s experience provides a checklist of things Boston should avoid.
First, although the city took schools’ academic records into account, the closures there were not strictly performance based and some of the receiving schools in Chicago were not considered high quality by the district.
Second, Chicago’s process was rushed: Teachers and families had just a few months to prepare. Boston should make sure any closures are announced early enough to give families time to plan ahead.
“You’d want students to be coming into schools that were set up well, where teachers are ready, where there’s been opportunity for students and staff to get to know each other. That didn’t necessarily happen” in Chicago, said Elaine Allensworth, the director of the UChicago Consortium, which issued a critical report in 2018 of the city’s school closures. (Wu and Skipper have said there will be ample time for families to adjust to any school closures or consolidations in Boston.)
Advertisement
While the school district in Chicago did put money into some programming at the receiving schools — including a safe routes to school program — it didn’t have a specific curricular or educational strategy tailored to the needs of transferring students. In addition to things like extra tutoring at receiving schools, “you need supports on the front end for students whose schools are closed so they don’t feel like failures,” Allensworth said.
Finally, in Chicago, the district played a complicated game of musical chairs with facilities, meaning that some schools were receiving an influx of new students and moving to a new facility at the same time, which added more stress to already difficult transitions.
There are more positive examples from other cities, too. One strategy used in New York City, which closed 29 low-performing high schools in the 2000s, was to give students at closing schools a choice: they could transfer to a different school or they could finish out their academic career at the school, which would shrink by one class a year until the last cohort graduated. A study afterward indicated that students who stayed at their old school as it wound down may have had slightly higher graduation rates.
In an interview, Skipper said she would be open to some kind of phased-in high school closures but was wary of creating situations where a senior class would be the only one remaining at an otherwise empty school.
However conscientious the district is, though, the reality is that closing schools is likely to be difficult. The best reason to close and consolidate schools is for future students, so that they’re more likely to attend fully enrolled schools in appropriately sized buildings. When New York closed schools, the overall impact on the students who were already enrolled in those schools was minimal. But for younger students — the ones who would have likely enrolled in those schools — there was a benefit. “They actually turned up somewhat better off. They had higher graduation rates than would have been expected,” said the study’s author, James J. Kemple.
Advertisement
But the district also owes it to students currently enrolled to do everything possible to ensure they come out ahead in the process — and a proven way to do that is to make sure as many students as possible are moving from lower-performing schools to better ones.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.
