Investigating School Closing Promises
Chicago closed 50 public schools a decade ago in the largest mass school closings in history. At the time, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel made three key promises: The vacated buildings would be quickly redeveloped into community assets; students would go to better resourced schools with all the bells and whistles and they would have a better chance of success at better schools. WBEZ Education Reporter Sarah Karp, along with WBEZ data editor and colleagues at the Chicago Sun Times, set out to test whether these promises were kept. They also were interested in how the school closings impacted the communities around them. In other words, did the fears that so many expressed when this was proposed come to fruition?
Doing this project took a combination of good ol’ fashion shoe leather reporting, as well as deep data analysis. In this presentation, Karp talks about the value of visiting every single closed school. She also talks about the community analysis that data editor Alden Loury did and how that led to one of the most profound findings: The areas around schools saw greater population declines than even similarly situated neighborhoods. Finally, she discusses the data sharing agreement with the Illinois State Board of Education that allowed Karp to compare the educational trajectories of students who were at schools closed in 2013 with those students who were in schools with comparable demographics and performance levels that stayed open.