The closure of low-performing and under-enrolled schools has become an increasingly common educational reform strategy.  Administrators have planned or executed large-scale closures in Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and several other cities in recent years. The logic underlying these proposals is clear: shutting down low-achieving schools will remove students from those contexts and provide them with an opportunity to attend higher-quality schools, which will result in improved student outcomes.  However, there are at least two factors that could impede the realization of improved outcomes.  First, there is no guarantee that students whose schools are slated for closure will move to schools of substantially better quality.  Particularly in large urban areas, there is a very real possibility that students will move to schools of similar—or even inferior—quality.  Second, school closure policies effectively force student mobility, which several studies have shown to negatively affect student outcomes (e.g. Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin 2004; Xu, Hannaway, and D’Souza 2009; Zimmer et al. 2009; Engberg et al. 2012).  Thus, it is an empirical question whether school closures promote desirable student outcomes.

We estimate the effect of school closures on student outcomes using data from the State of Ohio. The state has closed dozens of schools across several cities in a variety of contexts over the past decade.  The Ohio Department of Education has provided us with student-level records containing a wide variety of information—demographic characteristics, student achievement scores, educational attainment, disciplinary history, and even postsecondary enrollment in institutions in the state—for the universe of students attending Ohio public schools over a ten-year period.  Using these data, we identify the effects of school closure on student achievement and attainment outcomes in a regression discontinuity framework, leveraging Ohio’s automatic school closure law—which requires the closure of schools classified as being in “Academic Emergency” status in two of three years—to identify students attending schools just above and just below the closure threshold.  We track these students over a multi-year period in order to gain insight into both the short- and long-term educational effects of school closure.

This analysis will be among the first to provide strong evidence of the effects of an increasingly prevalent and controversial educational reform strategy.  The rich nature of the data allow us to examine not only student achievement scores, but also other outcomes such as attendance and attainment—including postsecondary enrollment.  Together, these results will provide a multi-dimensional picture of the impacts of school closures on student outcomes.