The effect of school closings on student achievement

•School closings are very prevalent, but highly controversial.•I use student-level micro-data to study the effects of school closings.•Achievement of displaced students improves if the closed school is low-performing.•Students in receiving schools suffer due to the influx of new students.

Many school districts across the country are shutting schools, but school closing policies remain a very controversial issue. The current study investigates the effects of school closing policies on student achievement by examining over 200 school closings in Michigan. Relative to the previous literature, the analysis uses a broader set of school closings to thoroughly investigate heterogeneity in treatment effects based on the performance level of the closed school. The results indicate that, on average, school closings in Michigan did no persistent harm to the achievement of displaced students. Moreover, students displaced from relatively low-performing schools experience achievement gains. The displacement of students and teachers creates modest negative spillover effects on the receiving schools, however. Hence, the closing of low-performing schools may generate some achievement gains for displaced students, but not without imposing spillover effects on a large number of students in receiving schools.