The influence of closing poor performing primary schools on the educational attainment of students

Abstract

This paper examines whether the closure of poor performing primary schools improved students' educational attainment. It is believed that school closure affects children's educational outcomes positively because children switch to better primary schools. At the same time, school closure creates a social disturbance such that educational outcomes may be affected negatively. There is no previous literature on the effect of this type of school closure on student performance. The empirical results indicate that student test scores are not affected by the school closure. Children are, however, tracked into higher secondary education levels after the school closure if they received more education years at the new primary school. This effect fades out and eventually becomes negative for children who received more than one education year at the new primary school. The results further suggest that there are no detrimental effects of a school closure in terms of educational performance.

Keywords:

• school closure
• student attainments
• education inspectorate
• primary education

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Orm Muilwijk and Andre Herbrink from the Municipality of Amsterdam for delivering the data. We would like to thank André de Moor, Tim Schokker, Paul van Oijen, Geert de Boer, Roel van Elk, Wim Groot, Henriëtte Maassen van den Brink, Monique De Haan, Nienke Ruijs, Cheng Ong, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the University of Amsterdam and Maastricht for a discussion on a previous version of this paper. The usual caveat applies.

Notes on contributors

Dr. Kristof De Witte is an associate professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven, Belgium, and at the Top Institute for Evidence Based Education Research (TIER) at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. He is also a guest researcher at the Amsterdam School of Economics. The research interests of Kristof De Witte comprise education economics, performance evaluation, and early school leaving. He has published his work in many international academic journals and has various publications in Dutch field and policy journals. He is a member of the international advisory board of the International Journal of Productivity Management and Assessment Technology and an external reviewer for the Dutch testing institute Cito. Dr. De Witte has received two international prizes for his doctoral dissertation, a paper prize, an award for his undergraduate thesis, and an award at the end of secondary education. More information can be obtained from www.econ.kuleuven.be/kristof.dewitte

Dr. Chris van Klaveren is assistant professor at Maastricht University and the University of Amsterdam. Van Klaveren's research interests cover education and labour economics, impact evaluation, and micro econometrics. He has published in various peer-reviewed international journals and was an invited speaker at many seminars and conferences. He is a member of the scientific board that evaluates a Microsimulation Model (Labor Supply and Taxes) of the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis and has received several research grants. In the past, Van Klaveren was a researcher for the World Bank in Washington, DC. More information can be obtained from https://sites.google.com/site/chrispbjvanklaveren/

Notes

1. Notice that for private schools in The Netherlands, the threat of school closure corresponds to a situation where the Ministry of Education decides not to subsidize a private school any longer, which then results in school closure.

2. We note that the use of standardized nationwide tests mitigates measurement error.

3. Note that if a school is characterized as “very weak”, the following actions are taken by the Education Inspectorate (see also Inspectie van het Onderwijs, 2009): (a) intensive supervision and (b) making an improvement and supervision plan. If this fails, the file is transferred to the Ministry of Education, which can decide upon administrative penalties, and partial or complete funding stops. Note as well that the legislation to close a school has recently been changed (August 1, 2010).

4. See http://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/leerachterstand; accessed on January 15, 2012.

5. It should be noted that different configurations of the education variable led to similar empirical results.

6. It should be noted that the Ministry of Education obligated schools to take the national exam in 2013.

7. By comparing the education outcomes to the position of the child after 3 years of secondary education, we carefully examined whether the outcome measures might be biased due to measurement error. The results indicate that there is no systematic bias or measurement error in the data.

8. Note that the results of Table 4 are very robust to the ordering of the school advices. Robustness tests with a different order of the pre-vocational education support track “lwoo” and of the kopklas results in very similar outcomes.