The reputable Consortium on Chicago School Research has issued a report showing that kids who attended schools shuttered by the district by and large have not seen their academic prospects brighten as a result of the closures.

Why? The simple answer is that Chicago Public Schools failed to send those kids to better schools than the ones they closed.

“Certainly, when schools were closed for academic reasons, the idea was to try to change their educational prospects and what they might obtain. Unfortunately, we didn’t find that,” said Julia Gwynne, a senior research analyst with the consortium and the report’s co-author. “The main reason why that seems not to have occurred was because most students did not attend schools that were substantially better than the ones that were closed.”

This sounds like a basic and all-too-typical failure of execution. Then again, when you have a system of failing schools, and the few strong schools are packed to the rafters, where are kids supposed to go?

As Nancy Mitchell reported recently, Denver has tried to honor former Superintendent Michael Bennet’s pledge to send all displaced kids to better schools than the ones the district closed.

Nancy wrote:

DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg said one in five of the students who had attended the nine closed schools did not return to a district school the following year.

Of those who did, however, and who also completed state reading, writing and math exams, their overall proficiency rates were better.

And, for the smaller number of students in the formerly closed schools who had completed enough years’ of state tests to produce growth ratings, those were better as well.

But the picture in Denver is far from rosy — and the district would be wise to study the new report and learn from Chicago’s mistakes. As Nancy reported, DPS’ good-looking numbers represent only about 500 of the 2,600 kids displaced by school closures. For various reasons, results aren’t available for the remainder of the students.

It seems obvious that schools have performed poorly for extended periods of time need to be overhauled. Sometimes this means closing down a program and providing something new in that school building. But doing this right usually means keeping a building empty for a year, while a new program is developed, a new leader and staff hired in preparation for reopening.

But as always, the challenge lie in implementing this well. As the Chicago experience demonstrates, shuffling kids from a failed school to a failing one is counterproductive.

So districts have two choices. They can either muster the political will to put displaced children into the best schools it has to offer — even if this causes political migraines. Or they can open new schools, be they charters, innovation schools, or district schools, that show more promise. But as our current school board election shows, this strategy carries political risks as well, and can cause a reactionary backlash.

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