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In his research, Pearman has identified a cyclical relationship between school closures and neighborhood change. Closing schools increases the likelihood that Black neighborhoods will gentrify. In turn, gentrification leads to lower enrollment as families are displaced and new residents opt out of the neighborhood school or don’t have kids to enroll. 

“If these school closures are promoting the further dispossession of communities of color, making them even less likely to retain their historic profile of being Black communities, then there’s broader conversations that need to be had about what these closures mean for the lifeblood of Black neighborhoods,” Pearman says. 

Research on the academic effects of school closures is mixed. If displaced students wind up at a substantially better school, they tend to do better. But students often end up at a similarly performing school, and the closure does academic harm. 

Another recent study found that school closures in Black communities can contribute to gentrification, which itself can mean fewer students enrolled in a neighborhood school. That “can lead to further school closures — which can start the cycle back over again,” said Pearman, who coauthored the study with Stanford graduate student Danielle Marie Greene.

Researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education combined U.S. Census data with national statistics on school closures to investigate whether the closures affected patterns of gentrification, a phenomenon marked by an influx of relatively affluent residents in previously disinvested neighborhoods and subsequent rises in housing prices.

School closures increased gentrification, the study found – but only in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

“School closures are one of the most politically fraught issues in urban school reform today,” said Francis A. Pearman, an assistant professor at Stanford GSE and lead author of the study. “This study sheds new light on the consequences of these closures, in particular for the future of Black communities.”

In a new study, researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and Big Local News, a project of the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab, examine the extent to which the enrollment decline was influenced by school districts’ decisions to hold classes in person or go remote.

As students in some parts of the United States approach nearly a year without in-person school, new research suggests that the reading skills of young children have suffered during the pandemic.

The research, a preliminary national study from the group Policy Analysis for California Education, found that as of late fall, second graders were 26 percent behind where they would have been, absent the pandemic, in their ability to read aloud accurately and quickly. Third graders were 33 percent behind.

Those differences were equivalent to being able to read seven to eight fewer words per minute accurately.

“In a sort of negative cascade, these outcomes are associated with a host of further reduced opportunities later in life, including lower engagement in school, reduced access to college, and higher unemployment,” said co-author Carrie Townley Flores, a doctoral student at the Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE). “Each of these negative outcomes indicate that the system that is in place is not supporting the child fully. As schools become aware of the risks associated with preterm birth, they may pay closer attention to it as a potential risk factor.”

There’s evidence that GreatSchools’ ratings are exacerbating racial segregation, not just within school systems but in the communities around them. “What makes GreatSchools popular is partly that they’re linked to real estate sites, which is partly what makes them dangerous,” says Sean Reardon, an education professor at Stanford University who studies poverty and inequality. “They start to overtly link people’s residential choices to what seems to be a measure of school quality. While that makes lots of sense if it’s a high-quality metric of school quality, if it’s more of a measure of socio­economic composition of schools, then it runs the risk of creating incentives for more socioeconomic segregation.”