The Long Shadow of School Closures: Impacts on Students' Educational and Labor Market Outcomes

Abstract

Each year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation, I explore the impact of school closures on students' educational and labor market outcomes. The findings indicate that experiencing school closures results in significant disruptions in both test scores and behavior. While the drop in test scores is recovered within three years, behavioral issues persist. These impacts are particularly pronounced among economically disadvantaged students. This study further finds decreases in high school graduation rates, lower college completion rates, as well as lower employment and earnings in the long run.

Keywords: school closure, demographic decline, low-performing school, student mobility, human capital development, long-run effect

JEL Classification: H40, I21, I28