School closures appear to slightly lower test scores

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Chalkbeat reviewed 17 studies published over the last decade, which look at how closures affected students’ academic performance in different cities and states. (You can find all the studies here.) They help answer a key question for those who fear closures hurt students academically — though they can’t capture other impacts of school closing on a community.

1. In many places, closures hurt students academically; in some others, they helped. Nationwide, closures appear to slightly lower test scores.

In a few cases, students whose schools closed benefitted in at least some way. That was true in four studies Chalkbeat reviewed: in Ohio, for instance, students saw major jumps in test scores post-closure; in New Orleans, closures boosted high school graduation rates by about 20 percentage points.

But these results were more exception than rule. In several other places, displaced students were harmed in measurable ways.

In Milwaukee, for instance, high school closures caused steep declines in high school graduation and college enrollment rates. A recent Chicago study — focusing on the highly controversial round of nearly 50 school closures in 2013 — showed that affected students had lower math scores even four years after the closure. (There were no clear effects on suspension or attendance rates.)

In another handful of studies, students’ academic performance declined but eventually bounced back, suggesting the closures were disruptive but the effects were temporary. A Michigan study looking at nearly 250 closures over a few years found a drop in math scores for displaced students after one year, though by year three the negative effect had faded away.

Based on these divergent results, it’s not a surprise that a major national study lands somewhere in between. This 2017 paper looking at over 1,500 closures across 26 states found, on average, very small negative effects in math and reading on displaced students.