A rusted slide on an old playground near an abandoned school building in Cairo, Illinois
In a world filled with uncertainty, one thing that America’s schools can bank on is fewer students to go around. As a Bellwether analysis released earlier this month explained, birth rates are down 14% over the past decade, and that already means shrinking enrollment in America’s elementary and middle schools, with declines coming soon in high schools, too. We have too many school buildings for too few students. Some campuses are going to have to close.
Ample research makes clear that forcing students to switch schools can be traumatic and even harmful, especially if they end up attending lower-performing campuses. Yet closing an underenrolled school is beneficial when displaced students land in better alternatives. And of course, the primary purpose of most closures isn’t just to help this generation of students. It ensures that future generations of children are well-served, too.
In the face of enrollment declines that won’t reverse for decades—if ever—common sense suggests that schools that are both underenrolled and underperforming should be the first to close.
Those of us at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute wondered how many such schools might exist. So we partnered with Brookings Institution fellow Sofoklis Goulas—whose prior work on enrollment decline is well-known—to identify public schools that were both underperforming and increasingly underenrolled. The result is our latest study, Underachieving and Underenrolled: Chronically Low-Performing Schools in the Post-Pandemic Era.
To identify low-performing schools, Dr. Goulas relied on states’ own judgments, using Comprehensive Support and Improvement designations (CSI), a provision in federal law requiring states to identify:
- The lowest-performing 5% of their Title I schools using a set of state-defined indicators.
- High schools with graduation rates below 67%.
- Title I schools with very low-performing subgroups of students that did not improve after being previously identified for “additional targeted support and improvement.”
To identify schools where enrollment had declined, Dr. Goulas looked at enrollment changes between 2019–20 and 2022–23, building on his previous work. For the purposes of this study, a decline of 20% or greater is considered “substantial.”
So, what did the analysis reveal?
- Nearly one in twelve public schools in the United States—or roughly 5,100 schools—has experienced a “substantial” enrollment decline in the wake of Covid-19 (i.e., between 2019 and 2023).
- Schools that were identified by their states as chronically low-performing were more than twice as likely to experience sizable enrollment declines as other public schools.
- Nationally, close to 500 schools that states have identified as chronically low-performing have experienced a substantial enrollment decline in the wake of the pandemic.
Readers can find in the appendix a list identifying these nearly 500 chronically underperforming schools where enrollment has declined substantially. These include:
- 35 schools in New York City
- 18 schools in Las Vegas (Clark County, NV)
- 15 schools in Milwaukee
- 9 schools in Tampa (Hillsborough County, FL)
- 8 schools in Chicago
- 8 schools in Philadelphia
- 8 schools in Louisville (Jefferson County, KY)
To be clear, it might not make sense to close each and every one of these schools. Local context will be important, especially factors such as the condition of school facilities, the distance to alternative schools, and especially the quality of other campuses where impacted students might enroll. But surely these schools should be candidates for closure as districts discuss how to downsize.
These are painful, politically fraught decisions, and we understand why district officials and local leaders often kick the school-closure can down the road for as long as they can. But many of them will eventually be forced to decide the fate of their half-empty buildings. What should inform that decision? To us, it’s clear: The foremost consideration is—within the resources available to us—what’s best for educating the students of this community?
