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A strike last week by some 29,000 teachers in Chicago pushed long-simmering tensions over deeply divisive school improvement ideas--including changes in teacher evaluation and the takeover or closure of underperforming schools--into the national spotlight. A framework for a tentative agreement emerged last Friday, and the union's house of delegates was scheduled to meet this past weekend to vet a draft and vote on whether to call off the strike. Details of the agreement were still trickling out, but it appeared likely that the Chicago district had offered to restore some elements of a hiring preference for laid-off teachers, to slow the implementation of a new teacher-evaluation system, and to allow limited appeals under that system. Students are expected to be back in school at the beginning of this week. About 350,000 students in the district, the nation's third largest, were affected by the walkout. In Chicago's case, one such complication has been the volatile relationship between two powerful city players: (1) Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the famously combative former chief of staff for President Barack Obama; and (2) Karen Lewis, the equally outspoken president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). The two have squabbled for months over Mr. Emanuel's desire to lengthen the school day, which was until recently among the shortest in urban school districts. The strike also raised delicate political questions for the White House during the tense run-up to Election Day. As in 2008, Mr. Obama is counting on the support of teachers, but his own education agenda has pushed for many of the reform ideas contested at the bargaining table. Such divisions were on display last week, as educators, clothed in CTU red, picketed in front of their schools after the walkout began on Sept. 10. Many motorists honked in support as they drove by. In the afternoon, thousands of the teachers flooded the city's downtown Loop area to attend rallies. Picketers stationed a giant, inflatable rat outside the school district's headquarters. They held up signs protesting large class sizes, too much standardized testing, and the perceived capitulation by Democrats to the education agenda of influential foundations and interest groups. But above all, the teachers took aim at their city's mayor, a testament to their frustration with his leadership of the schools, which the mayor controls under authority granted by a 1995 state law. The Chicago district has a history of contentious labor relations, but the strike was the first by the city's teachers in 25 years.

As school closures are increasingly used as a remedy to budget woes and a solution to failing schools in many cities, debates are intensifying about their effect on student performance and well-being, on district finances, and on communities and the processes districts use to choose which schools will be shuttered. Student and parent groups in Chicago, the District of Columbia, New York, Newark, New Jersey, and Philadelphia gathered in Washington late last month to call for a moratorium on school closings and filed separate complaints with the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights. In those complaints, the groups allege that in previous rounds of school closings, their districts have not been transparent and have been influenced by outside interests, such as charter school operators. They also argue that the closings have had a harmful and disparate impact on minority students and communities. Each of the districts has predicted new closures for the coming school year. But district officials say their school closing decisions are often necessary, driven by a pressing need to improve schools quickly, close budget gaps in the face of shrinking public revenues, or respond to federal or philanthropic education opportunities. Concerns about disrupting students' education and neighborhoods' structures make school closures a perpetually difficult political and emotional issue, but recent rounds of closings are particularly fraught. The growing number of students enrolled in charter schools instead of traditional public schools in struggling districts has led to some--though not most--of the underenrollment that spawns closings and has prompted accusations from the affected communities of schemes to privatize public schools. The impact of closures on teachers and communities was a concern in the much-publicized teachers' strike in the 404,000-student Chicago district last month. And there is a growing sense in the communities affected that previous rounds of closings--nearly 150 in New York City, which currently operates about 1,700 schools and more than 80 in the 600-school Chicago system, in the past decade--have not always led to the promised goals for disadvantaged students. Even when closing schools is a financial or demographic necessity, "there are good and bad ways to do school closure." Done well, closures can result in a more efficient use of resources, which benefits students in the long run. But other experts say the negatives outweigh the positives, especially when closings are intended as a school improvement effort rather than a budget fix.

One of the most vexing questions about charter schools--when low-performing ones should be shut down--is receiving new attention, amid concerns that lax and inconsistent standards for closing them will undermine the public's confidence in the sector. Over the past few years, a growing number of researchers, policymakers, and charter school backers have called for removing obstacles to closing academically struggling schools, though many barriers remain. Numerous states have approved laws in recent years that have raised or clarified standards for charter school performance, while also establishing policies to make it easier for charters to open and secure facilities and public funding. Even so, state and local policies vary greatly in their expectations for charter schools, and in the standards they set for authorizers--the state, local, or independent entities typically charged with approving charters and overseeing their performance. According to a report released this year, the nationwide rate of closure of charters schools up for renewal has actually fallen over the past three years, which could be interpreted as a sign of improved quality, weaker oversight, or some combination of both. Another recent estimate shows that the percentage of charters in different states that have shut their doors varies widely--from zero to 5 percent in some states to well over 20 percent in others. Debates about the standards for closing struggling charters are nothing new, either in the context of broader policy discussions or in communities weighing the performance of individual schools. But the issue has received more intense focus lately from pro-charter groups that say they want to ensure that the sector, which has grown fairly steadily for two decades, is held to high standards.

Paulden Elementary, a school serving about 75 students, was started in 2001 in a rural area some 30 miles north of Prescott, Arizona. An independent audit of the school in 2003 found several problems, including failure by the school to have fingerprint-clearance cards and criminal-history checks for some staff members, failure to abide by the state's open-meeting law, and inaccurate reporting of student-attendance data. In voting to close the school last spring, the state charter board cited the audit's findings, among other reasons. No mention was made of academics, which is not unusual; poor academic performance is rarely cited as the chief reason a school should close. The school claims in its lawsuit that the state failed to give Paulden Elementary sufficient opportunity to correct problems and contradicted some of the findings of fact offered by an administrative-law judge who reviewed the school's situation, among other issues. The ability to close schools that are not up to snuff is a fundamental principle of charter schooling. The publicly funded but independently run schools receive greater autonomy than most other public schools in return for a promise to be held accountable for results. If a school isn't working, charter advocates say, shut it down. Yet decisions to close charter schools are often met with fierce opposition, even in cases where the schools have serious organizational, financial, or academic problems. In this article, the author discusses several similar lawsuits across the country, either ongoing or recently resolved, in which decisions to close charter schools have been challenged.

The challenges of keeping Catholic schools open in working-class neighborhoods were brought home last February 2005, when the Archdiocese of Chicago announced it would close 23 elementary schools and merge or consolidate four others in June 2005. Two weeks earlier, the Diocese of Brooklyn in New York City decided to close 26 elementary schools in Brooklyn and Queens at the end of the school year, although four will be reopened as regional schools. Such announcements are raising grave concerns over the toll that rising costs, changing demographics, and declining enrollments are taking on the longtime Roman Catholic mission of providing schooling for needy children. Chicago's Catholic school closings will affect 4,187 children. Since it was set up in 1986, the Big Shoulders Fund in Chicago, a nonprofit organization independent of the archdiocese, has raised $138 million for Catholic schooling. This school year, it is giving $14 million to 103 of the neediest schools in the archdiocese. The archdiocese subsidizes operating costs of its schools by about $6 million each school year. Such financial support was not enough to keep afloat the schools slated for closure in Chicago. In fact, 18 of the 23 schools scheduled to close are beneficiaries of Big Shoulders.

In this article, the author features the Gesu School, a small, inner-city, K-8 Catholic school in Philadelphia. She describes how it has transformed itself since 1993 from a school barely eking out an existence to one with a $5 million--and growing--endowment fund and a powerful, ecumenical board of business executives and other lay people. The Gesu School, say some experts, is an example of an emerging national trend. As more Catholic schools are closing or consolidating because of declining enrollment and parish membership, and weak financial support, more schools--especially those in urban areas--are becoming financially independent, headed by business and marketing-savvy lay boards, with a spiritual commitment to helping the needy. In 1993, the Gesu School taught 200 students on the second floor of a badly deteriorated building in a poor, drug-ridden neighborhood. It had almost no operating funds. It was a school with an uncertain future. Today, the school is bursting at the seams with 433 neighborhood students, many of whom go on to academically competitive high schools. It boasts crackerjack leadership, development, and teaching staffs. Gesu has a 57-member trustee board that includes some of the best business and philanthropic minds in greater Philadelphia. It was those backers, along with an administration anchored by a Jesuit priest and an Immaculate Heart of Mary nun, who shored up the Gesu School.

With the nation's charter sector now encompassing some 3,200 schools in 40 states and the District of Columbia, shutdowns have become more common occurrences in the past few years. As estimated one in every 10 charter schools has now closed its doors, up from only about 4 percent four years ago. Most authorizers who take their responsibilities seriously agree that weeding out bad schools is a vital component of the autonomy-for-accountability bargain at the heart of the charter school concept. But amid the sparks thrown off by closings, those authorizers are often ending up singed. As shutdowns grab headlines--particularly when schools collapse in midyear, stranding students, families, and staff--their authorizers may come under fire for how they've handled the process. As a result, leaders among the authorizers that grant the contracts to operate to publicly financed but independent schools--including states, school districts, universities, and others--are getting serious about sharing their experiences and finding better ways to pull the plug. As they struggle to develop policies and protocols to shut weak charter schools, authorizers are grappling with issues that may increasingly apply to regular public schools as they fall under sanctions for sub par performance imposed by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

If big-city districts are looking to close budget gaps, shuttering schools may not be the best strategy. Closing schools does not save very much money in the context of an urban district's budget, and selling or leasing surplus school buildings tends to be difficult because they're often old and in struggling neighborhoods, a recent report from a Philadelphia research group says. On the positive side, however, the study finds that students appear to make it through a school closure with minimal effects on their academic progress. And it says school districts can help generate some acceptance for a downsizing plan by involving the community early and establishing clear reasons for why certain schools must close. The report was written by the Philadelphia Research Initiative to foreshadow what the 154,000-student Philadelphia district can expect over the next few years as it plans to close a number of schools because of declining enrollments. The report looks at school closings in Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Mo., Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and the District of Columbia. Each of those districts has closed at least 20 schools in the past decade, and most of the buildings have been shuttered in the recent past.

The impending closure of the Manual Education Complex in Denver is sparking a conversation about what can be learned from the experience at a time when the nation has pinned high hopes on improving secondary schools by turning them into smaller, more personalized environments. The Denver high school, which subdivided into three schools in 2001, will shut its doors in June 2006 after persistent poor academic performance. The conversion of the comprehensive high school was among the first financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As such, Manual has been in a fishbowl since its reorganization into small schools. Policymakers, scholars, and activists have been watching and evaluating the effort.

If a flu pandemic breaks out in the United States, as many as 4 in 10 school-age children will become sick, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which released a comprehensive plan on how it would deal with such an outbreak. The nearly 400-page plan says the department would consider measures such as closing schools early in a pandemic to combat flu pandemic and to help control its spread, especially before a vaccine was available or while it was in short supply. School closings would accompany other measures, such as restricting travel, screening people from affected areas, and isolating infected persons. Though school health experts caution against overreaction, they agree that preparedness is paramount. They say that districts need to begin work now to ensure they are not caught sleeping. The federal plan, issued amid worries about avian flu, places children low on the list of groups that would have priority for receiving vaccines, because they generally have been at a low risk for hospitalization and death in prior pandemics and during the annual flu season. Anecdotal reports suggest the spread of a pandemic can be better controlled when schools are closed early in an outbreak. School districts are advised to come up with their own plans on how to respond to an influenza pandemic.

Across the U.S., urban school districts are losing students and shuttering schools. In Detroit, some 35,000 students have left the city schools in less than a decade, and the city will close 34 schools and reassign more than 10,000 students in 2006. However, the trend is not limited to Rust Belt cities like Detroit, although their problems tend to be more dramatic. Population shifts, steep housing costs, open-enrollment policies, and competition from charter schools are reshaping city school districts. In addition to Detroit--which one education expert described as being in a "death spiral"--districts in Akron, Ohio; Baltimore, Maryland; Buffalo, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; Kansas City, Missouri; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Oakland, California; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; St. Louis, Missouri; and Seattle, Washington, are contending with enrollment losses. Fewer students means less state aid to spend, even though some expenses remain fixed. In this article, the author discusses the declining enrollment numbers in urban districts around the nation, and presents examples from these districts that show the extent of the challenges school leaders are facing.

Many school districts in sparsely populated areas of the Midwest and West are contending with dwindling enrollments. Nevertheless, small communities such as Robinson, North Dakota, are resisting pressure from the state and neighboring districts to merge with other school systems. A graph depicts North Dakota enrollment since 1963. Arguments for and against consolidation are given. (CDS)