When New York City targeted six struggling high schools for closing, the action may have had a side effect on the schools’ students: They were less likely than their peers at similar schools to graduate college-ready and more likely to graduate with a local diploma, which is less rigorous than New York state’s Regents diploma.
That’s according to an analysis released last week by the city’s independent budget office.
The study also showed that students in the second of the two cohorts studied were less likely to graduate on time when compared with students at demographically similar low-performing schools that were not slated to close.
The budget office looked at students who were in 9th, 10th, and 11th grades at three comprehensive high schools that were slated to close in 2006-07 by the administration of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and three that were being phased out in 2008-09.
In both groups, the impact of the closure on 11th graders was more “muted,” the report says, possibly because those students were already close to finishing high school when the closures were announced.
