School Closures: A National Look at a Failed Strategy

Carol Burris

by Carol Burris

Twelve community activists on the south side of Chicago are capturing national attention by putting their health on the line to save their school. It is their third week of a hunger strike designed to force Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel to keep Dyett High School open.

Dyett serves the community of Bronzeville on Chicago’s south side. Bronzeville was the cultural hub for African Americans who fled the south during the Great Migration. The school’s significance in the community runs deep.

The struggle to save the school is part of the growing pushback against neighborhood school closures both within and beyond Chicago—closures that slam poor communities who find beloved institutions shuttered and yanked away. In just one evening, in May of 2014, the Chicago School Board voted to close 50 public schools. A 2014 report by Journey for Justice, entitled Death by a Thousand Cuts, describes the devastating effects of school closings and maps the march of school privatization in communities of color across the United States.

Poor test scores and low graduation rates are the excuse for closures, but the reasons for academic failure that lie beyond the schoolhouse are never addressed. NPE Board member, Jitu Brown, who is part of the hunger strike, summed up the frustration when he said, “We’re tired of our children and our communities being demonized and being blamed for being underserved.”

The schools that are closed

The story of Dyett is a familiar story in underserved urban communities across the United States. As far back as 2011, closures in New York City were criticized for their disparate impact on schools that served the largest numbers of disadvantaged students and were located in communities that needed the stability of a school the most.

A 2011 report by the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO) recognized that the demographics of the 14 schools slated for closure served a disproportionate number of homeless students, black students, special education students, low income students, and students who were overage for their grade. Ironically, one third of the schools on the list had replaced another school that had been closed before it—repeating a cycle of disruption for neighborhood kids. In a 2013 report, the same patterns emerged— schools on the chopping block served a more disadvantaged student population, and students entering the school had lower scores.

Even as the identified schools were set up for failure, the schools that often replaced them were set up for success. When the schools were reconstituted as smaller schools, they generally served populations of students with less need and higher entering test scores. One report issued by New York City Communities for Change referred to the shutting and opening of schools as nothing more than “a shell game.”

In a beautiful tribute to the once great Jamaica High School, alumni Jelani Cobb, tells the history of the school and how its final demise was brought on by the policies of the Bloomberg administration. In the end, school choice, which dramatically disrupted the demographics of the school body, pushed the school over the test score brink, thus leading to the closing of the school. Cobb writes, “In the battle over the school’s future, many came to see those changing demographics not as happenstance but as a purposeful way of insuring that the creation of small schools in the building would be a fait accompli.”

Although Bloomberg is gone, not much has changed. NPE board member, Leonie Haimson, has been fighting New York City closures since 2011. She was hopeful that school closures would stop when Bloomberg exited, yet now these same schools are being threatened by takeover from the state. “Every neighborhood school that is closed is a tragedy for that community. All efforts should be taken to preserve and strengthen them rather than close them down. Sadly, I’m not sure that even this administration [DeBlasio] is implementing the right policies to ensure these schools improve and survive.”

The human impact of school closures

Cobb begins his story of Jamaica High with the commencement ceremony of its last graduating class, the Class of 2014. Twenty-four graduates were pushed out of their school auditorium for that ceremony, as what remained of Jamaica High School competed for space with the new, co-located school.

Such sad events are not unique. The New York Times featured photographs from a Philadelphia art show that captured the raw emotions felt by community, students, and staff in one of the 31 city schools that were shut down. School ‘closings by the numbers’ exact a human toll when students and teachers lose their place. Some scramble to find spots in other schools once the decision to phase out the school is made. Many students become “over the counter” enrollees in schools where there is space, which is often another school that is spiraling down. The school slated for closure withers away until only a few dozen students remain. It begs the question, are school closings worth the price?

Do school takeovers work?

Reformers will tell you that school takeovers work miracles, and they will point to New Orleans as their proof. While it is true that New Orleans’ state test scores are higher, the complexity of what occurred in that city (including the mass migration out after Katrina) has added variables that are unique and impact results. Doug Harris, the Director of the Research Alliance for New Orleans,speaks not only of the complexity of measuring achievement, but also of the unevenness of improvement. He makes it clear that New Orleans’ lessons “can not be summed up in a headline.”

Takeovers in 2012 in Indiana have resulted in little improvement in achievement and steep drops in enrollment in takeover schools. Of the schools taken over that year, only one had its grade improve from an F. Meanwhile, Tindley Schools, a charter school organization that managed one of the schools, pulled out. They wanted more money to continue.

In 2012, six schools joined the Tennessee Achievement School District, headed by reformer, Chris Barbic, who was charged with turning them around. Three were run by the district; and three were privately run by charter operators using public funds. For two years scores were stagnant. In the third year, math scores in the district-run schools improved, but in the charter-run schools scores declined. Mr. Barbic announced his resignation as of December of this year.

None of this should come as a surprise. In 2002, the state of Pennsylvania began what was called “the nation’s largest experiment in the private management of public schools” in Philadelphia. A 2007 study by the independent, non-profit research organization, the Rand Corporation, found no increases in achievement from the private management of Philadelphia schools, but small gains in restructured schools controlled by the district. Those district-controlled schools that improved were given extra resources and intensive staff support.

The same failed strategies replayed

And yet, despite the dismal results of private control of public schools in the state’s largest city, the same bad playbook was used in Pennsylvania’s York City School District in 2014. NPE President, Diane Ravitch, lamented the loss of citizen voice in the community. “There will be no ‘choice’ for the families of York City. Their children will have to attend a charter school whose headquarters are in Florida. Yes, it is the death of local control and democracy in York City.”

Since Governor Corbett’s defeat, the York City model has softened. David Meckley, whose plan was to turn the district over to charter schools, resigned citing the new Governor’s hostility to his charter takeover plan. The new chief, Carol Saylor, is a veteran educator who is taking a public-school friendly approach. But without adequate resources, improvement will be tough.

NPE board member, Mark Miller, is the Vice-President of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. He sums up the problem faced by Saylor and her counterpart in Chester Upland, where employees are working without pay, this way. “York City and Chester Upland receivers, Carol Saylor and Francis Barnes, are trying to bring about positive change. Unfortunately, nothing can change without more money or fewer unfunded mandates. The unjust enrichment of charter/cyber charter operators is at the crux of the problem.”

And so in Chicago the hunger strike continues—twelve brave souls carry the pain not only for Dyett, but for so many schools who are blamed for conditions out of their control. They are becoming physically weaker by the day, but their spirit is strong. And that hunger for justice will continue until the cycle of shame, shutter, and student displacement and neglect finally ends.

(Note: The city announced it would keep Dyett open as an “arts” school to attract students from across the city. The hunger strike is continuing.)

Please support the Dyett School hunger strike by calling the Rahm Emanuel’s office (312) 744-3300 and tell him that you support the Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School. On Twitter, send out support at #fightfordyett.

Jeanette Taylor-Ramann

In Chicago, Hunger Striking To Save a School
Why are Chicago parents on a hunger strike to save a neighborhood school? Because after five years of fighting, they’ve run out of options...

By Jeanette Taylor-Ramann

LINKWhat’s happening in Bronzeville isn’t just about Dyett High School. There’s an agenda to push out black and brown low income and working families in the city of Chicago. If you look at the big picture, that’s what this is about. You don’t only have police brutality. You don’t have only have a decrease in public housing in the city and the closing of public schools. The neighborhood school is the last stable institution that we have. When you have good neighborhood schools, they service the neighborhood. They keep kids off the street; they help parents when they’re struggling and having issues in the home. That neighborhood school is a support system for the community, and the powers that be know that.

This isn’t the life I chose. It chose me.

I’m a forty year-old mother of five, soon to be a grandmother. I was a teen mom, and I’ve been on the Local School Council (LSC) at Irving C. Mollison Elementary since I was 19. I’ve always had to participate in my children’s education. My mother did it for me, and when I became a mother, she pushed me to be responsible. She said *that’s your child. You’ve got to be a part of the school culture.* My grandmother was one of the first teacher’s assistants at Mollison, DYETT my auntie is a teacher there, my mother was on the PTA. She’s been a clerk at the school for 20 years. This isn’t the life I chose. It chose me.

For almost my entire life—34 years—I’ve lived in Bronzeville. I’ve recently been pushed out because of gentrification. I can’t afford the rent in the neighborhood, so for the last three years I’ve resided in Woodlawn. The transformation in Bronzeville started back in the 1990’s when they knocked down the public housing and began to build up the neighborhood. But what I started to notice was that when they put up replacement housing, it wasn’t for the people who’d lived in the neighborhood for years. So you’re pushing out the people who can’t afford to live there. If you’re not making $50,000 a year or more, you’re not able to afford to live in Bronzeville.

A line in the sand
There are currently 12 people on a hunger strike. Every day more people join us from around the city who’ve decided to go on a fast with us. We have a pastor, a Latino brother, we have a white brother whose community said *we don’t want a Noble Street charter in our neighborhood* and they left. He’s joined up despite the fact that this isn’t touching him. School closures haven’t really affected some of these other communities the way have us, but they took the charge to say *if these parents and community members can do it, I’m going to join them.* I have two other of my Local School Council members hunger striking with me, another active parent from my school, and an ex parent who helped me fight off two previous attempts to close Mollison Elementary. You’ve got people who’ve been in the community working and fighting for years who’ve said *enough is enough.* The line in the sand has been drawn and people have to answer for mistreating our young people.

You’ve got people who’ve been in the community working and fighting for years who’ve said *enough is enough.* The line in the sand has been drawn and people have to answer for mistreating our young people.

Part of the problem
Charter schools aren’t the solution, they’re part of the problem. Don’t get me wrong. There are some good charter schools, but most of them aren’t doing any better than neighborhood schools. And they have no accountability. They have no Local School Councils. LSCs at schools are the people who hire and fire the principals and oversee the budgets. Nobody does that at charter or contract schools. These people are able to charge parents $10 or $20 when their kids don’t have a belt or a tie. Then at the end of the year when your grades aren’t good enough to make their profile look good, they get to kick you out and then you’re sent back to the neighborhood school.

We’ve got to look it in the face and call it what it is: racism. It’s only happening to a certain group of people. Period.

No stake in the community
Why should these people be allowed to set up shop? Because that’s what it is. They come. They’re here for four or five years. They have no stake in the community. They do nothing with the community. And then after they’ve made millions and millions of dollars but without educating our children, they leave. Charter schools are a way for bankers and billionaires to make money off of the poor. It’s racism. We’ve got to look it in the face and call it what it is: racism. It’s only happening to a certain group of people. Period. And I don’t care who that’s uncomfortable for, and who thinks I’m going too far by saying that. It’s the truth. I can’t find another reason. I pay my taxes like everyone else, I go to work everyday. I send my kids to school. So what is it? There’s no other factor. This is based on the color of my skin.

Connecting dots
I’m very discouraged that in 2015 parents have to go to this extreme for a neighborhood high school. People have to answer for that. What did Martin die for? What did Malcolm die for? How can we get the next Barack Obama? How can we get any of those folks if our kids can’t even be educated? They want to make everything private. I’m not crazy. I’ve been to New Orleans. I’ve seen the kids still attending schools in trailers while they got billions and billions of dollars. I’ve been to Philadelphia. I’ve been to Detroit. I’ve been to New Jersey to see the parents who are fighting in Camden. The connecting dot is that there is an attack on black and brown low-income working families.

Jeanette Taylor-Ramann is a member of the Local School Council at Mollison Elementary on Chicago’s South Side. She is one of twelve parents and community members on a hunger strike to keep open the last open-enrollment high school in Bronzeville.

 

Klein-Clone Jean-Claude Brizard Now Tries To Stop A Strike of The Teacher's Union In Chicago

Much of suit over D.C. school closures is dismissed; rights claims may proceed

By Emma Brown, Published: October 11

DC Chancellor Kaya Henderson

LINK

A federal judge has dismissed most of a lawsuit that sought to stop the closure of 15 D.C public schools but is allowing several of the plaintiffs’ civil rights claims to move forward.

Judge James Boasberg

“In the end, Plaintiffs have failed to allege facts that would sustain the majority of their counts,” Judge James E. Boasberg wrote in an opinion Thursday. “Some issues at the heart of this case, however, remain open.”

Activists with the community group Empower D.C. filed the lawsuit in March in an effort to stop 13 of the schools from being closed in June. They argued that the school closures violated a number of local and federal laws, including civil rights provisions. The closures disproportionately affected black, Hispanic and disabled children, they argued.

Boasberg declined that initial request to block the closures, ruling in a strongly worded opinion that the activists had “no likelihood of ultimate success on the merits” of their complaint. They had showed no evidence, he said, that Chancellor Kaya Henderson and Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) had intended to discriminate.

In Thursday’s opinion, Boasberg appeared no less skeptical of the activists’ position, saying that their civil-rights arguments “may ultimately be too slender a reed” on which to hang their case. But under the law, he said, they deserve time to gather and present information before he issues a final ruling.

“That said, however, the Court is not in the business of sanctioning a fishing expedition into decades of [school system] files,” Boasberg wrote. “Only targeted discovery will garner approval.”

Empower D.C. activists said they were pleased with the ruling. “We’re happy that we can still litigate on some of the counts around discrimination,” said Daniel del Pielago, an organizer for the group. “We’re still in the game.”

A spokesman for the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, whose lawyers are representing Henderson and Gray in the case, declined to comment. D.C. officials have argued that they needed to close schools with low enrollment to use resources more efficiently and improve education across the city.

DCPS consolidation and reorganization plan

Chancellor Kaya Henderson names 15 D.C. schools on closure list

By Emma Brown, Published: January 17, 2013

LINK

More than one in 10 D.C. public schools will close as part of a plan Chancellor Kaya Henderson put forth Thursday, a retrenchment amid budget pressures, low enrollment and growing competition from public charter schools.

Henderson will shutter 15 schools, affecting more than 2,400 students and more than 540 employees. Closing half-empty schools will allow her to use resources more efficiently, she said, redirecting dollars from administration and maintenance to teaching and learning.

The move is another benchmark in the fundamental remaking of public education in the District, where the school system has lost more than 100,000 students since its peak enrollment in the 1960s.

City leaders have been faced with underenrollment for years, but the situation has become more pronounced with the rapid growth of charter schools since the mid-1990s. Funded with taxpayer dollars but operated independently of the school system, charters now enroll more than 40 percent of the city’s students, putting Washington at the leading edge of a national movement toward charters.

“We can’t ignore the fact that we as a city have embraced school choice,” Henderson told D.C. Council members during a briefing Thursday. “If we proliferate charter schools, we have to know that is going to have an impact.”

Five years ago, then-Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee accelerated the downsizing of the D.C. school system when she moved quickly to close 23 schools, igniting angry protest and long-lasting political backlash while spurring an exodus of students to the city’s charters.

Henderson’s proposed closures also triggered opposition, but she is widely seen to have handled community relations more deftly than her predecessor, sponsoring a series of public meetings throughout the city and inviting parents and activists to help refine the closure plan.

That feedback persuaded the chancellor to remove five schools from her original closure list, including Garrison Elementary and Francis-Stevens Education Campus, two Northwest Washington schools in relatively affluent neighborhoods. Parents at both schools mounted vigorous campaigns against closure.

Henderson cited parents’ willingness to help recruit new students and demographic data showing that Northwest neighborhoods, particularly around Garrison, are growing faster than officials previously understood. Francis-Stevens will fill its extra space by serving as a second campus for the School Without Walls, a selective high school nearby.

Faced with criticism that she hadn’t given equal consideration to parental concerns and ideas emerging from less-privileged parts of the city, Henderson said that many of the proposals she received included requests for extra investments of millions of dollars.

“Lots of folks came up with plans. Some we were able to move with, others we were not able to,” Henderson said. “Leadership is about making hard decisions.”

Smothers Elementary in Northeast also will stay open, as will Malcolm X Elementary in Southeast, which will be operated in partnership with a “high-performing charter school” that Henderson declined to identify. Southeast’s Johnson Middle School will stay open because school officials say they think that moving the students to other schools filled with teenagers from rival neighborhoods could cause safety concerns.

All 15 schools marked for closure are east of Rock Creek Park, many of them east of the Anacostia River in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, and all had below-average test scores. They include the first high school to close in recent memory — Spingarn Senior High in Northeast — and Kenilworth Elementary, in the middle of a neighborhood that last month won a $25 million grant to strengthen local education and other services.

Thirteen of the schools will close at the end of this academic year, with the remaining two — Sharpe Health and Mamie D. Lee, schools for students with disabilities — to close in 2014.

On Thursday, Henderson for the first time offered an estimate of money to be saved through the closures: $19.5 million in staffing costs. Approximately $11 million will be needed for transition costs, Henderson said, resulting in a net savings of $8.5 million.

The last round of closures, in 2008, cost millions more than initially reported, according to an audit released in August. Henderson said the school system is more confident in its savings estimates now.

The savings will be plowed back into schools to improve programming, including into libraries and arts and foreign language offerings, Henderson said, adding that the public will get a detailed view when school-by-school budgets are released in the coming months.

About 140 staff positions will be lost, but given normal attrition through resignations and retirements, Henderson said, “we actually feel like the loss will be minimal.” She said she does not expect any teacher evaluated “effective” to be out of a job.

The chancellor said she does not anticipate releasing any buildings from the D.C. Public Schools inventory. She said she needs to keep control of the facilities so they can be reopened as enrollment rebounds.

That news was maddening for charter school advocates, who often struggle to find suitable and affordable D.C. real estate. City law requires that surplus public school buildings be made available to charter schools.

“The mayor is making a mistake,” said Robert Cane, executive director of the pro-charter Friends of Choice in Urban Schools. “What we have here, it’s about defending DCPS from the popularity of the charter schools, and it has nothing to do with getting more kids into quality schools. Nothing.”

Henderson said her staff has plans for reusing some buildings, such as Spingarn, which will become a vocational education campus focused on transportation careers. But officials are still working on plans for many of the buildings.

The prospect of closures triggered intense debate in recent months about the future of the city school system, including at community meetings and two D.C. Council hearings that together lasted more than 14 hours.

Some parents, activists and politicians worry that shutting the schools will drive families into the city’s charter schools, which could lead to declining enrollment and further closures in the traditional school system. After the 2008 closures, thousands of children left the system for charter schools, according to a study by three think tanks.

The school system now enrolls about 46,000 students in 123 schools.

“We cannot repeat what happened with the last closures,” said D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D). “DCPS has got to be much more aggressive than it was three years ago in retaining students and recruiting students.”

D.C. Council members will have a chance to quiz Henderson about her school closure plan Wednesday at the first hearing of the newly constituted education committee, which is led by David A. Catania (I-At Large).

Across the city Thursday afternoon, schools that had been slated to close cleaved into two groups: those that were spared, and those were not.

“My kids like this school, and I don’t want to see them start over,” said Raheem Bates, 24, the father of two Kenilworth students.

A few miles away, Shannon Smith prepared for a protest at the chancellor’s home. Her two grandchildren attend Ferebee-Hope Elementary, which will close over the objections of parents and staff. “I don’t know why they would want to close this school,” said Smith, who called the move “ridiculous.”

But across town at Garrison, relieved parents hugged each other and high-fived their kids. Kierra McPherson, 23 wiped away tears as she picked up her preschool son. McPherson graduated from Garrison, as did her mother and cousin.

“It’s a tradition,” McPherson said. “This is my school. We got our school back.”

James Arkin and Alex Kane Rudansky contributed to this report.