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While the fight over closing schools may be hotter than the weather this summer, the evidence shows that this is not a strategy that works to help all New York City kids get the education they deserve. Yet Mayor Bloomberg has adopted it with a single-mindedness that makes no sense. He has closed more than 140 schools since he took control of the city's school system in 2002. Bloomberg's agenda has disrupted school communities, alienated parents and destabilized neighborhoods. College-readiness rates in the new schools created to replace closing schools are abysmally low, and overall grad rates in these new schools have actually been falling, even as overall grad rates remained flat. Instead of closing schools, there is a better and more effective intervention to turn them around. The Chancellor's District was an innovative program involving nearly 60 schools that flourished from 1996 to 2003 under a joint agreement between then-Chancellor Rudy Crew and the UFT. It's an approach we can use in the 24 schools that are now the subject of litigation between the Department of Education and the principals' and teachers' unions over how they will be staffed.

"School closings, the threat of which hang over Chicago public schools, and which have been a central feature of Bloomberg educational policies in New York, are perhaps the most controversial features of the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" initiative. The idea of closing low-performing schools, designated as such entirely on the basis of student test scores, removing half of their teaching staff and all of their administrators, and replacing them with a new (typically charter) school in the same building, is one which has tremendous appeal among business leaders and almost none among educators. Advocates see this policy as a way of removing ineffective teachers, adding competition to what had been a stagnant sphere of public service, and putting pressure on teachers in high-poverty areas to demand and get high performance from their students, once again based on performance on standardized tests. For a "data driven" initiative, school closings have produced surprisingly little data to support their implementation."

Yesterday, the NY State Assembly Education Committee held a rare hearing in NYC on the state and city's implementation of the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, the so-called "turnaround" schools, and how the entire program is in complete disarray.    The big news is that the city is determined to go ahead with turnaround model for 26 Persistently Low Achieving schools even if they receive any of the federal funds to do so. Turnaround  is an euphemism for closing these schools, firing much of the staff and reopening them in the fall with new names  There is massive confusion and no public input about the plans for these schools, and yet the city seems determined to close and reconstitute them, like lemmings going over a cliff, even at the city's taxpayers' expense.  Why?  Because they can. See Two Years In, Federal Grant Program To Improve Struggling City Schools Has Derailed (NY1); Plans to Close 26 Schools Will Proceed Regardless of Financing, City Says (Schoolbook) and Chancellor: Plan to Close, Reopen Schools Was Not Act of 'Revenge' (WNYC) and Walcott: Turnaround will happen even without federal funding (GothamSchools).  My testimony is here on how many these schools and their students have been systematically disadvantaged by overcrowding and extremely large class sizes; with no plans by the city or the state to do anything to address these deplorable conditions.

The dozen schools moving toward closure in Nassau and Suffolk counties are not the first ones since the Great Recession wreaked havoc on municipal budgets. The Lawrence School District closed one of its elementary schools in 2009, Bower Elementary School in Lindenhurst closed in 2010, and Cross Street Elementary School in Mineola closed last year. So did 134-year-old Stella Maris Regional School in Sag Harbor-the oldest Catholic school on Long Island. Not that precedent eases the pain.

A major unintended consequence of this ill-conceived reform movement is that it is distracting local school administrators and boards of education from closing and/or reorganizing schools for the right reasons by focusing all of the attention on closing schools for the wrong ones. In fact, even when school officials might wish to consider closing schools for logical reasons, they now seem compelled to say instead that they are proposing specific actions because the schools are "failing!" Not because they are too small to operate at efficient scale, that local demographic shift warrants reconsidering attendance boundaries, or that a facility is simply unsafe, or an unhealthy environment. In really blunt terms, the current reformy rhetoric is forcing leaders to make stupid arguments for school closures where otherwise legitimate ones might actually exist!

In the last decade, many cities around the country have needed to close schools due to declining enrollments and low achievement. School closings raise concerns about the possible negative impacts on student achievement, neighborhoods, families, and teaching staff. This study examines an anonymous urban district that, faced with declining enrollment, chose to make student achievement a major criterion in determining which schools would be closed. The district targeted low-performing schools in its closure plan, and sought to move their students to higher-performing schools. We estimate the impact of school closures on student test scores and attendance rates by comparing the growth of these measures among students differentially affected by the closures. We use residential assignment to school as an instrument to address non-random sorting of students into new schools. We also statistically control for the contemporaneous effects of other reforms within the district. Results show that students displaced by school closures can experience adverse effects on test scores and attendance, but these effects can be minimized when students move to schools that are higher-performing (in value-added terms). Moreover, the negative effect on attendance disappears after the first year in the new school. Meanwhile, we find no adverse effects on students in the schools that are receiving the transferring students.

The UFT on March 5 issued a subpoena and notices of deposition to compel the testimony of former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, along with 11 Department of Education officials, in a continuing lawsuit over the DOE's plans to close a group of city schools. The orders seek the testimony of the current and former DOE officials as part of a lawsuit filed by the UFT, NAACP, parents and elected officials in March 2011. That lawsuit charges that the DOE failed to provide the additional services it had promised to help 19 schools, 2 of which the DOE has since closed and 15 of which it voted to close last year.

Schools Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott said on Wednesday that the city will close and reopen 26 schools this summer, regardless of whether New York State's education commissioner approves the plans. State education officials have set a goal for themselves of issuing a decision by June, at which point they will either sign off on the city's plans and restore nearly $60 million in federal grant money that they have withheld, or reject the proposals and leave the city to cover costs for the second half of this school year, roughly $36 million. But with or without the financing, the schools will close, Mr. Walcott said.

Philadelphia public schools are on the operating table, reeling from a knockout blow of heavy state  budget cuts. It was too much to bear after decades of underfunding and mismanagement at the hands of shortsighted Philadelphians and mean-spirited politicians in Harrisburg. So the District is today announcing that it's going to call it quits. Its organs will be harvested, in search of a relatively vital host. "Philadelphia public schools is not the School District," Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen told a handful of reporters at yesterday's press conference laying out the five-year plan proposed to the School Reform Commission. "There's a redefinition, and we'll get to that later."  He got to it: talk about "modernization," "right-sizing," "entrepreneurialism" and "competition." Forty schools would close next year, and six additional schools would be closed every year thereafter until 2017. Closing just eight schools this year prompted an uproar. Anyhow, the remaining schools would get chopped up into "achievement networks" where public or private groups compete to manage about 25 schools, and the central office would be chopped down to a skeleton crew of about 200. District HQ has already eliminated about half of the 1,100-plus positions that existed in 2010. 

As the closing of "failing" schools becomes an annual ritual, along with the opening of brand-new schools (some of which will eventually join the ranks of "failing" schools), it is time to ask about where accountability truly lies. I wonder if  it ever occurs to anyone in the New York City Department of Education that their own policies of closing schools and shuffling low-performing students around like checker pieces on a checker board have actually created "failing" schools. Every time they close a large high school with large numbers of low-performing students, those students are then pushed off into another large high school (like Dewey) that is doomed to "fail." Why doesn't the leadership of the DOE ever take responsibility for helping schools that have disproportionate numbers of students who enter ninth grade with low test scores, including students with disabilities, homeless students, and students who are English language learners? Their methods of "reform" look like 52-pickup: Just throw the cards in the air and hope that somehow you come up with a winning hand.

Scowling at a lengthy document from the city detailing its proposal to close John Adams High School in Ozone Park, and reopen it with about half the teachers replaced next fall, student Symone Simon gives the packet of papers a dismissive flick of her wrist and issues a harsh verdict of Mayor Bloomberg - he has failed her and her classmates, who want their instructors to remain put. "The mayor says 50 percent of the staff that works here is not doing their job, but there has been a 17 percent increase in graduation rates to 64 percent over the last three years," said Simon, a senior and one of the editors at John Adams' school newspaper. "I've seen people grow so much here - that's what our teachers do for us. They're like our other parents." John Adams High School is one of 33 that the mayor wants to close in the city, including eight in Queens. First proposed in his State of the City address in January, the plan to close the schools will be voted on April 26 by the city Panel for Educational Policy - often known as a rubber stamp for all the mayor's schools plans because it has never rejected anything Bloomberg proposed. Queens Borough President Helen Marshall's appointee to the PEP, Dmytro Fedkowskyj, has repeatedly voiced his opposition to the school closures, as have other borough presidents' appointees.

In this report I discuss why it is so important that authorizers close failing charters, review the facts about charter and authorizer performance, examine why some authorizers fail to close underperforming charters, and propose solutions to these problems. To answer such questions, I have reviewed the literature and interviewed fifteen current or former charter authorizers and another ten experts on charter schools. In addition, thanks to the generosity of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), I have reviewed the data accumulated by its annual surveys of authorizers.

The politics behind closing a "C" rated school that claims to outperform 9 out of 10 schools in the area. Scandal-plagued politicians connected to school may have spurred closing to forestall future embarrassment over how political connections helped get the charter school. Did Walcott, who comes from a part of Queens where he would be well aware of the activities of these politicians, decide to cut the cord before more scandals emerge? Does Walcott know something will come out soon?

For the first time, New York City is closing a charter school for the offense of simply being mediocre. The announcement this week that the city planned to shut Peninsula Preparatory Charter School, a seven-year-old elementary school in Far Rockaway, Queens, was unusual by any definition. Since 2004, the city has closed only a few of its 142 charters that have opened - schools that are publicly financed but privately managed, and are a source of competition for traditional schools.

Most of the coverage about the Department of Education's role as a charter authorizer in recent weeks has focused on the management scandals at the Believe Network and the decision to close Peninsula Prep after three years of C's (although interestingly enough, the role of for-profit charter manager Victory Schools has mostly been left out of the Peninsula Prep story, despite quotes from current Victory executive and past DOE Charter Office head Michael Duffy in the Times coverage of the school's closing). Equally important, however, was the DOE's decision to grant a two-year renewal to the third school it had placed on the closure list this year - Opportunity Charter School, a charter founded to serve students with special education needs. The DOE's threat to close Opportunity had inspired a passionate response from the school's community, including powerful presentations of evidence from the district's own progress reports showing its success in helping students with intense special education needs achieve academically and graduate from high school at rates well above other schools in the city.

In nearly two decades, only 3 percent of charter schools have ever been closed for underperforming, according to a new report released Tuesday. The Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter advocacy group, traced charter-school closures since 1992 in what it called the "first-ever national analysis" of its kind. It found that 15 percent of 6,700 charter schools have been shuttered, and 18 percent of those closures were attributed to academic underperformance. Other prevalent reasons charter schools were closed include financial deficiencies (41.7 percent), mismanagement (24 percent), district-related issues and facilities problems.

New York City is filled with schools marked twice over for death. The Bloomberg administration long ago determined that its education revolution would occur at the edge of an ax. So far, officials have closed 140 schools, which they routinely describe as failing, and replaced them with smaller schools and charters, which they routinely describe as making "historic gains." Perhaps this is so. But for tens of thousands of children who live in the purgatory of schools marked for closing, boasts of an education revolution bring little comfort.

The UFT and the Council of School Supervisors & Administrators on May 7 filed suit in New York State Supreme Court to prevent the "sham" closing and restaffing of 24 schools that would be reopened almost immediately in the same buildings and with the same students. The lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order and injunction that would be in effect until the issue can be resolved through arbitration.

So, let's look at a few big old schools and the new ones that replaced them in the same building. In particular let's look at the schools' comparative reading levels and comparative math. Until very recently, I didn't have these files, and until very recently I didn't think about same-building schools (called campus schools) too much, either. But then, the DOE made an inaccurate and unsupported claim about one of these campuses, and a few weeks later, Communities for Change set the record straight. The DOE's claim was the usual one ("similar" kids, astronomically better results). But the report from Communities for Change, showed that campus schools across the city were serving much lower concentrations of high-need special education students than the schools that they replaced. Before the old Seward shut down, for example, the concentration of self-contained students was 9%. In 2011, the new campus schools served 0%. Seward Park campus is in Manhattan, and the new schools earned As and Bs. Like disability averages, school wide average scores give us a good indicator of whether or not kids are ready for high school. Here is a comparison between incoming scores at closed old high schools and at the new schools on their campuses. These are actually relative rankings, and the details are explained below.

The NJ Department of Education (NJDOE) under Acting Commissioner Christopher Cerf is gearing up to intervene in 75 predominately Black and Latino "Priority" Schools, action that could lead to massive school closings within three years. The schools targeted by NJDOE for closure are in very poor neighborhoods across the state and have served these communities for decades. The NJDOE plan for "aggressive intervention" and potential school closures is the centerpiece of a new "accountability" initiative launched by the Christie Administration after obtaining a U.S. Department of Education waiver from certain provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2011. The waiver allows NJDOE to use test scores and graduation rates to create three new classifications of schools: "Priority," "Focus" and "Reward."