The recent Baltimore City Public Schools decision to close Southwest Charter School (A Baltimore community stands to lose its second school in two years, Dec. 12, 2024) is another victory for technocrats and statisticians in the evaluation of schools and communities.

Summarizing the value of a school without spending considerable time in both the school and the community allows for closures that devastate students, staff and parents. The evaluation teams assigned by the school district spend little time in classrooms, engaging with students or meeting parents. Instead, a team of evaluators who know little about the community make lightning visits, a kind of drive-by assessment by the numbers, not the real, lived experience of people.

It is always the poorest, least well-served communities that lose one more institution that won’t be replaced. The conditions that create academic struggle won’t be improved, the education of our young people won’t get better, but the school board and district administrators will justify themselves as “held accountable.” There is no evidence that the district’s policy on closures has made any positive difference to education in the city. There is lots of evidence of the harm closures cause!

Jon McGill

Jon McGill is a retired educator and administrator