This is true. There are safeguards (that are currently failing) that my program would engage:
- The state is legally required to provide those kids with an education.
- There is funding allocated to help those districts.
If "we will not pay you if the kids do not learn" means there are zero schools in those districts then (1) the state government will get sued for not doing its job (because closing 100% of the schools makes the failure objective and obvious) and (2) it will have to update those funding formulas so that it is possible for some school (state run, or private) to break even while providing an education in those areas.
With sympathy to your appeal that 100% closures will force us to reckon with the problem, I suspect it'd only lead to missing the forest for the trees. This would come with substantial pains to the community. Potentially ones that knock-on to other pains.
You're at the root of why this is a tricky problem to solve. In fact there is no solution, just a wide basket of expensive things we should aspire to do to improve affairs.
- The local public school goes from 80 kids per grade to 40, and a new school opens across the street or just rents an existing building from the existing school district.
- Funding stays flat, and academic performance goes up.
- Administrators get to decide which teachers to lay off, and they will be de facto fired if they get rid of the high performers while keeping the low performers.
- If the union contracts make it impossible to retain the high-performers, then the school eventually shuts down, and teachers that are competitive on the job market get hired by the new school for similar pay / benefits.
- Teachers at the new school get evaluated on whether they do their job, and the new administrators have a strong financial incentive to use performance-based evaluation instead of seniority / nepotism / whatever.
The pains I was thinking of largely occupy the transitionary period of a school closing before alternatives are open.
When does the deficient school close? After this new school is opened? If not, what happens to students and families that depend on an education in the interim?
Who pays for this new school? Must they immediately show improvement or do they get some years to show that their approach is working better?
Will the metrics even be accurate in the new school? Will there be a self-selecting bias in the newly formed student body?
I don't think these details are particularly hard to work out:
- You can shrink the deficient school to zero by reducing teacher count starting in the lower grades and moving up, and by allowing parents to opt for transfers in higher grades.
- The building still exists, so you could reuse it. Or, investors could build a new school. Obviously, there's some lag in the measurement, since it requires a few years of student data. I'd say look at the first and second derivative of the test scores. Note that the claw-back model deeply screws over investors that fund substandard schools. This is likely to create stranded real-estate for the next round of investors to buy at a discount.
- The metrics are produced downstream, so there shouldn't be measurement bias. There probably will be self-selection bias. There are existing funding mechanisms to deal with challenging student bodies. If those are working, then the per-student funding of the old school with skyrocket. If the old school still fails, then that produces a high-revenue group of students for some other new school to take on. If those funding mechanisms are not working, then it creates an externally detectable signal to the outside world that the problem is one level up (no schools in certain areas), making it easy for voters / courts to intervene (currently, those funding mechanisms are failing, and no one is held accountable).
investors? you're going to raise the cost of primary education to accommodate enough of a margin to attract investors? I thought we were talking about public education so that people in our society can at least read - a task that we're doing pretty bad at. The private school system for the 1% is doing just fine already.
- The state is legally required to provide those kids with an education.
- There is funding allocated to help those districts.
If "we will not pay you if the kids do not learn" means there are zero schools in those districts then (1) the state government will get sued for not doing its job (because closing 100% of the schools makes the failure objective and obvious) and (2) it will have to update those funding formulas so that it is possible for some school (state run, or private) to break even while providing an education in those areas.