Hartford Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez says her controversial plan to consolidate schools will save money and improve education, but national studies show that closing schools often doesn’t achieve either goal.
Torres-Rodriguez’s plan, which will be voted on Tuesday night by the school board, calls for closing Batchelder and Simpson-Waverly elementary schools in June, as well as 10 other school buildings over the next three years, for an eventual annual savings of $15 million.
With many of the schools operating well under enrollment capacity, Torres-Rodriguez has said the consolidation and reconfiguration plan will allow the district to improve cost-efficiency, so that more resources can be concentrated in fewer schools. The savings from the plan would also be reinvested into the remaining schools.
But research from organizations such as the Philadelphia Research Initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts, raises questions about how much can be saved by closing schools.
In a study of school closings in six cities, including Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh, Pew reported that any money saved as a result of closings “at least in the short run, has been relatively small,” with the largest savings achieved when “closings were combined with large-scale layoffs.”
But typically, closing a building does not cut many teaching jobs, the 2011 report said, because “most of the teachers are redeployed instead.”
While the Hartford Federation of Teachers has expressed great concern about the possible loss of jobs, school officials have said that the plan projects a loss of 90 positions cut during the three-year-period — a number far lower than the average turnover of about 200 employees through attrition every year in the Hartford district.
The Pew report also said that selling or leasing surplus school buildings is a factor in whether any savings are achieved, “tends to be extremely difficult.”
On the whole, it said “No district has reaped anything like a windfall from such transactions.”
Edgar Villanueva, vice president of programs and advocacy for The Schott Foundation for Public Education in New York, said that savings often are hard to achieve because a district can’t sell the surplus buildings and has to pay to keep them up, has to pay increased school transportation costs for students attending schools that are farther away and have to do some renovation to the receiving school.
Other studies, such as one done by the Consortium on Chicago School Research in 2009, found that the performance of students in schools slated for closing fell after impending closure was announced and remained low for the rest of the year.
However, the study found that a year later, after transferring to new schools, the students were doing about the same as they had been doing at their previous school.
Marisa de la Torre, a senior research associate with the consortium, said that when they dug into data, they discovered that most of the students transferred from one low performing school to another.
However, she said 6 percent of the students did transfer to a higher performing school and those students did show an improvement in test scores.
The other effect her research showed, de la Torre said, is that student mobility increased in the year after a student moves from a closing school to a new one. After spending a year at the new school, she said, students often move to a third school in the following year, “probably implying that they didn’t find a really good environment,” in the initial transfer.
Paul Diego Holzer, executive director of Achieve Hartford!, said he supports Torres-Rodriguez’s plan, but said he would like to know more about how she intends to improve the educational offerings at the Hartford schools that will be receiving transfers from Simpson-Waverly and Batchelder.
Holzer said the savings on school closings “is never as much as people think it will be. “
Other studies have said that if a large number of students from a low-performing closing school transfer to a higher performing school, the students in the recipient school often show a decline in performance.
Another major consideration, researchers say, is the effect of closed schools on neighborhoods.
Tom Pedroni, an associate professor in the College of Education at Wayne State University in Detroit, said that mounting evidence shows that closing schools has “a very negative effect on surrounding cities, so it basically blights the neighborhood and it increases the desire to leave the neighborhood.”
He said that in Detroit a massive school closing plan has driven many students out of the district and resulted in worse student performance than when it began.
Pedro Zayas, spokesman for the Hartford schools, said Torres-Rodriguez is aware that closing and reconfiguring schools is “a challenging process, that there is is not silver bullet, but her focus is on improving educational outcome.”
But he said, “cutting down on excessive building expense due to low enrollment is a step that must be taken.”
