Flawed work to close city schools will hurt Columbus for years to come. It must be fixed. (2024)

'The current school consolidation efforts will have profound impact on our community for decades to come. It’s not too late to fix the school district’s flawed approach,' Vladimir Kogan

Vladimir Kogan is a professor of political science at the Ohio State University.

Later this spring, the Columbus school board will have to make tough decisions involving closure of district school buildings. This is long overdue — after hemorrhaging enrollment for years, the district is desperately in need of right-sizing.

But doing school consolidation the right way means prioritizing student learning.

Unfortunately, early indications suggest that many other fiscal and political considerations seem to be driving the process, and there is substantial risk that current closure efforts will cause students — already suffering from pandemic learning disruption — to fall further behind.

Columbus City Schools has too many buildings

First, some background: Before last November’s school levy election, the district released a vague financial analysis comparing Columbus to other “similar” school districts and suggesting we were spending too much maintaining too many buildings that are too old.

However, the analysis did not identify the peer districts, making the numbers difficult to verify.

More: Columbus school board names 28 to task force to help decide school closings, consolidations

Fortunately, similar data are publicly available from the federal government, and they underline the magnitude of the disconnect between the number of students Columbus currently serves and how many schools it operates.

Compared to districts of similar enrollment, educating students of comparable racial diversity and economic disadvantage, Columbus operates nearly 80 percent more schools than its peers.

For example, while Columbus has more than 110 school buildings, St. Lucie in Florida operates just 52, despite serving roughly the same number of students. The Killeen Independent School District in Texas, which also educates about 44,000 students, has 54 schools.

Even San Francisco — a system long known for fiscal profligacy and adult political dysfunction — operates fewer schools while serving 5,000 more students than Columbus.

So saying that Columbus desperately needs to reduce its physical footprint is an understatement.

But deciding which buildings to shutter is the key, and here the current process is fundamentally flawed.

School closing process inadequate, dangerous

Under the school board’s policy on school closure, the first factor that is supposed to drive closure decisions is the “efficacy of educational program at a building.”

Oddly, however, academic outcomes are completely absent from the list of criteria that the district’s Facilities Task Force has decided to prioritize.

And the reality is far worse.

One of the factors that puts a school higher on the closure list is having a greater share of students “transferring in” — attending the building despite living outside of its attendance boundary. Yet, as an analysis by my OSU colleague Prof. Sara Watson has shown, the transfer-in rate is a significant and positive predictor of academic achievement, especially for middle and high schools.

The reason that families seek out these schools, despite living in other parts of the city, is because of their strong academic programming. Under the current closure process, high achievement is perversely considered a demerit that increases a school’s risk of closure.

If the current criteria are allowed to dictate the final closure decisions, there is a high risk that student learning will suffer.

Bad standards are being used to determine school closures

Sadly, it seems district leaders are far less interested in academics than other issues.

A major motivation seems to be dramatically cutting back the district’s school choice program — to avoid current state fines for failing to transport students and to get out of having to provide transportation to charter and private school students.

And a renewed focus on “neighborhood” schools, with students limited to attending buildings close to their home, also seems to be designed to increase student numbers in under-enrolled buildings to keep them out of charter schools’ hands.

A return to a neighborhood school model would be a disaster for Columbus students. Neighborhood schools when neighborhood are highly segregated in terms of both race and income, as they are in Columbus, means schools that are highly segregated. It means the district’s most disadvantaged students getting its least experienced, lowest-quality school teachers. It means a worse education, not a better one.

The current school consolidation efforts will have profound impact on our community for decades to come. It’s not too late to fix the school district’s flawed approach.

Vladimir Kogan is a professor of political science at the Ohio State University. His research focuses on state and local politics and policy.