IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp4739.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Demographics, Fiscal Health, and School Quality: Shedding Light on School Closure Decisions

Author

Listed:
  • Billger, Sherrilyn M.

    (Illinois State University)

Abstract

In our current challenging budgetary environment, school closures remain a potentially attractive choice. With a large panel of Illinois schools from 1991 to 2005, I investigate which factors contribute to school closures. Among elementary schools, declining enrolments and rural locations coincide with closures. However, schools with higher per-pupil spending are ceteris paribus less likely to close. Furthermore, better test scores also yield lower probabilities. High expenditures contribute to junior high closure, but the most significant predictors are the proportions of black and low income students. Administrators may claim that low enrolments and high spending motivate school closures, but in Illinois, that is not the whole story.

Suggested Citation

  • Billger, Sherrilyn M., 2010. "Demographics, Fiscal Health, and School Quality: Shedding Light on School Closure Decisions," IZA Discussion Papers 4739, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp4739
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp4739.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tavana, Madjid & Ebrahimnejad, Ali & Santos-Arteaga, Francisco J. & Mansourzadeh, Seyed Mehdi & Matin, Reza Kazemi, 2018. "A hybrid DEA-MOLP model for public school assessment and closure decision in the City of Philadelphia," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 70-89.
    2. Hazans, Mihails, 2010. "Teacher Pay, Class Size and Local Governments: Evidence from the Latvian Reform," IZA Discussion Papers 5291, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    education finance; education administration; school closures; tax policy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I22 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Educational Finance; Financial Aid
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy
    • H75 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Government: Health, Education, and Welfare

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp4739. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.