Closing and Opening Schools: The Association between Neighborhood Characteristics and the Location of New Educational Opportunities in a Large Urban District

ABSTRACT:

New charter schools can potentially provide disenfranchised students with enhanced academic opportunities while simultaneously serving as neighborhood anchors that reinforce neighborhood socioeconomic growth. However, for both of these arguments to be true, charter schools would have to replace low-performing public schools in currently disadvantaged, but revitalizing, neighborhoods. Using data from the Chicago Public Schools, the Common Core, and the Census, we examine the neighborhood and school-level factors that account for where elementary schools closed and opened in Chicago during the late 1990s and 2000s. We find that schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods were more likely to close, but only because these were also underperforming and under-enrolled schools. After controlling for educational demand, new schools were more likely to open in neighborhoods that showed signs of socioeconomic revitalization and declining proportions of white residents.

Notes

1 The 21 quadrats that make up O’Hare Airport, and the 12 quadrats that primarily cover Lake Michigan were excluded.

2 Average household income is used because it is impossible to aggregate median household income to the quadrats without individual level data. In robustness checks using the census tract as the neighborhood, the results were the same using average household versus median household income.

3 An additional 6 schools that were never on probation were also closed. Three were recently opened (since 2001) charter or small schools that did not survive, the fourth school was listed as closed because of underutilization, the fifth school was listed as closed due to poor performance, and the reason for the closing of the sixth school (a special education school) could not be identified.