In recent years, a number of states and school districts in the US have engaged in large scale school consolidation reforms driven by infrastructure underutilization and the objective of reallocating scarce resources across schools. We investigate the determinants of this type of school consolidations, their effects on student enrollment and achievement, as well as the consequences for teachers, using data from over 400 consolidations of public elementary and middle schools across Puerto Rico during the period 2010-18. We document that the school closures are orthogonal to students' academic performance at baseline; the strongest predictors of school closure are low aggregate enrollment levels and small average class sizes. We find that school closures cause a 1.2 percentage point decline in enrollment that rebounds within two years after displacement. Using a matched event study design that controls for students’ enrollment histories, we observe no persistent negative effects on students’ achievement in mathematics or language standardized tests, consistent with the existing literature. Moreover, students displaced from underperforming schools experience large achievement gains relative to their non-displaced peers. These positive effects coincide with accessing teachers with higher baseline value added, and are much larger in magnitude compared to estimates from higher-performance school districts. We find no evidence of spillovers from student and teacher displacement on receiving schools. Altogether, the results indicate that cost-saving consolidations can be made without harm to achievement when schools are closed in the vicinity of adequate alternatives, and under ideal circumstances are highly advantageous.
This paper assesses whether expansion of school choice through the open enrollment provision of `No Child Left Behind' (NCLB) was effective in shifting students away from low performing schools in California. Under NCLB, schools failing to make `Adequate Yearly Progress' (AYP) for two or more years were forced to offer students the option to transfer to AYP-passing schools. Using the discontinuous assignment to treatment based on a school achievement threshold, I identify the causal effect of being sanctioned with open enrollment on subsequent enrollment growth. I uncover small and statistically insignificant enrollment declines for schools that marginally failed to make AYP and were sanctioned with school choice for one year, and statistically significant declines in enrolment growth of 2.7 percentage points for schools that had school choice for a second year. Evaluation of heterogeneous treatment effects, and a case study of a large urban district, suggest that due to supply constraints transfer take-up was low even in the presence of high-performing nearby schools. The results highlight the limitations of top-down school choice policies that fail to expand access to quality schooling options.
Fieldwork is in progress to experimentally evaluate a territory-wide principal management training program in collaboration with the Puerto Rico Department of Education.
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