How Often Should Schools Close?

I’ve been writing a lot lately about the poor performance of Missouri’s schools; for recent examples, see here and here. I don’t enjoy being all doom and gloom, but I worry that many Missourians don’t grasp the scale of the problem. I can give plenty of examples of schools and districts in our state where most students are not testing at grade level, and many are not even testing within a year of grade level.

Yet these schools and districts rarely face meaningful consequences and there is virtually no threat that they will close, which raises an interesting question: How often should schools close? Frequent closures would clearly be disruptive, but too few could also be a problem. In a healthy education ecosystem, schools that consistently underperform should be replaced with better alternatives. That’s what would happen if the public school system operated like a market.

However, public schools rarely close. And when they do, it’s usually due to declining enrollment or budget cuts, not poor performance. As a result, even schools that fail year after year remain open and funded.

All of this points to a perverse indicator of the effectiveness of expanded school choice: more school closures. This may seem counterintuitive, but if charter and private schools close at higher rates than traditional public schools, it suggests they operate in a system where failure has consequences. That’s a good thing. Replacing inferior providers with stronger providers, through competition, helps make markets more efficient.

Given this background, I enjoyed reading this recent study by Doug Harris and Valentina Martinez-Pabon. It puts hard numbers on school closures nationally. The authors estimate that just 0.9 percent of traditional public schools in the United States closed annually between 2014 and 2018. In contrast, closure rates were 2.9 percent for private schools and 5.1 percent for charter schools—roughly three and six times higher, respectively. The higher closure rates are a sign of a healthier market.

It may feel like a foregone conclusion that failing public schools will always persist, but it doesn’t need to be. Infusing more competition into our education system will push all schools to perform better. And for low-performing schools that cannot figure out how to improve, it will force them to close, making way for new, higher-quality providers. These changes would benefit all children, but especially those who are currently trapped in persistently ineffective schools.