Turnaround and Closure Rates in the Charter and District Sectors

Paying for School Choice: Availability Differences among Local Education Markets

“…Given that all the school districts in Cook County have different extents of choice availability, the householders' race in school districts accounts for the probability that students will transfer to better learning environments. The growth curve models presented minor, and therefore negligible, effects of time change on choice availability, similar to the recent study which found that persistently underperforming schools do not experience significant turnarounds for the notable impact of student characteristics on achievement (Stuit, 2012). This study also indicates that school districts with lower choice availability are physically adjacent to ones with better availability; differences in choice availability between a given school dis-trict and its neighboring ones are largely explained by the housing features in the school districts.…”

Rethinking the School Closure Research: School Closure as Spatial Injustice

“…district officials and researchers varied in the performance benchmarks they used to justify or examine academic closures, such as different or changing standards for "low performance" (Luppescu, Allensworth, Moore, de la Torre, & Murphy, 2011), making it difficult to determine the actual performance of "low-performing" schools targeted for closure. Still, this logic has been a key component of hundreds of school closings since the mid-2000s (de la Torre & Gwynne, 2009;Han et al, 2017;Steiner, 2009;Stuit, 2012).…”

“…While researchers have paid much attention to academic accountability as a motivation for closure-and several studies focused specifically on schools closed due to low performance (Han et al, 2017;A. W. Johnson, 2012;Stuit, 2012;Subramaniam, 2011;Weber, Farmer, & Donoghue, 2018)-academic performance is rarely the sole explanation for closure. Officials usually justified recent urban closures with a combination of cost efficiency and academic performance arguments.…”

Teacher Migration: Extension and Application of the Population Ecology Model to Explore Teacher Transfers in a Reform Environment

“…Yet, unlike individual organisms, some corporations and many schools never cease to exist. For instance, Meyer and Zucker (1989) detailed the operation of "permanently failing organizations" and Stuit (2012) illustrated the continued persistence of low-performing public and charter schools. Although policy mechanisms in the No Child Left Behind Act and the Race to the Top grant facilitated the process of closing a school, closures still did not occur with the same frequency as the death of an organism or the bankruptcy of a corporation (Jambulapati, 2011).…”