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Philadelphia school leaders say the aim of their plan to close 20 schools is clear: give all students better opportunities and support school communities.
By restructuring how the district uses its facilities, Superintendent Tony Watlington has said the district could provide all students with better buildings, more rigorous academic offerings, and more access to arts, music, and physical education.
“Part of the problem here is that there’s so much disparity in the school district of Philadelphia,” Watlington said last week when announcing the plan.
But some members of the City Council say they’re already worried that the proposal would leave students and families in some neighborhoods of the city worse off, and that areas affected by school closures previously are being targeted again.
Nearly half of the schools the district wants to close are in areas the district has identified as vulnerable, based on neighborhood social factors and prior school closures.
Some students at closing schools are also getting a tougher deal than others, because they would move to worse-performing schools, according to Chalkbeat’s analysis of the plan. That can hurt the performance of students at the lower-performing schools for years, researchers have found.
School leaders say they’re listening to communities and heeding the research about how to best go about closing schools and restructuring enrollment.
The district’s plan would mean no students would attend school in buildings rated poor or unsatisfactory, based on their cost of upkeep. And more students would have access to some highly desirable schools and programs, like career and technical education and selective admissions schools.
But as reactions to the district’s school-closure plan roll in, several officials have said they worry the proposal has left their neighborhoods shortchanged.
Several schools in Kensington and surrounding neighborhoods, for example, have a high social vulnerability rating as determined by the district based on several factors. The city also closed the area’s Sheridan West Middle School in 2013.
Still, the district has proposed closing several schools around Kensington. Students at one of those schools — John Welsh Elementary in Norris Square — would move to a school with lower performance, based on state test scores.
“Moving students out of their neighborhoods adds stress, disrupts learning, and pulls them away from the community ecosystems that support them,” said Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, who represents Kensington, in a statement. “Equity cannot mean asking the same neighborhoods to carry the heaviest burden, again and again.”
Closures would move hundreds to lower-performing schools
District officials have previously said that they would not focus on school performance in their decisions about which schools to close. Instead, their decisions hinged on factors like how much unused capacity a school building has, whether it has spaces for programming like gym classes and prekindergarten, and social factors in its neighborhood.
That’s unlike the city’s last round of school closures in 2013, when officials scrutinized schools’ test scores when making closure decisions.
Under the new plan, around 90% of the 5,000 students at schools the district plans to close would be reassigned to better-performing schools, based on last year’s test scores on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA.
But that still means around 400 students at two schools — John Welsh and Overbrook Elementary — would be reassigned to worse-performing schools.
That could create looming challenges for those students, past research has found.
In studies of past school closures in Chicago, researchers found that one year after their schools closed, students who switched to high-achieving schools made gains in math and reading after the closures.
By contrast, students who were moved to the lowest-performing schools lost more than a month’s worth of learning in reading, and a month and a half’s worth of learning in math.
A study of Philadelphia’s school closures in 2013 also found that the achievement of students reassigned to high-performing schools improved after the closures, even though other factors, like school absences, increased for displaced students.
“We know that if the students go to really high performing schools, they did slightly better,” said Marisa de la Torre, managing director of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, who conducted the Chicago study.
But she added that school performance is often not what matters most to families, who may care more about keeping their children close to home or in an area they trust. That means districts must balance how they prioritize school performance with other community interests in their decision making process.
The district did not respond to specific questions about the decision to move some students to lower-performing schools. District spokesperson Monique Braxton said the district plans to create a transition team to support school communities through the closures.
Will some neighborhoods go through repeated school closures?
One issue Philadelphia residents have said they care a lot about is reducing harm to neighborhoods where the city previously closed schools.
At community engagement events the district hosted over the summer to get input for its plan, several residents said they worried neighborhoods still reeling from school closures in 2013 would be affected again. That year, a state-appointed board closed 24 city schools. Empty school buildings from those closures still sit unused in some neighborhoods, slowly deteriorating.
School officials said they would factor in information about which neighborhoods were hit by closures in 2013 through a “neighborhood vulnerability” score. The district did not share exactly how it calculated the scores, but said they were based on social vulnerability data from the Centers for Disease Control and whether the school community had experienced school closures in the past.
Still, in the final list of recommendations of which schools to close, nine of the 20 closures are of schools with neighborhood vulnerability ratings of “very high risk” or “high risk.”
That has frustrated several city leaders.
“It seems like we’re headed towards the same people being disadvantaged by this process who are always disadvantaged by this process,” said Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, who represents part of West and Southwest Philadelphia.
Still, Gauthier said the district’s approach does feel like an improvement from the school closures of 2013. She said she appreciated the district’s willingness to hear feedback and host community engagement sessions.
She just hopes that leads to changes to the proposal.
“We still have the opportunity to make sure that there’s equity,” Gauthier said.
Chalkbeat senior data editor Thomas Wilburn contributed to this story.
Rebecca Redelmeier is a reporter at Chalkbeat Philadelphia. She writes about public schools, early childhood education, and issues that affect students, families, and educators across Philadelphia. Contact Rebecca at rredelmeier@chalkbeat.org.
