Opponents of Mayor Daley’s Renaissance 2010 initiative have been pointing out for some time that the rationale for privatizing schools just doesn’t add up. Schools in gentrifying neighborhoods are repeatedly shut down -- despite decent performance -- and private companies are left to manage others that often fail.  New research released by professors at the University of Illinois-Chicago only raises more questions.

Even with several major advantages, UIC professor Eric Gutstein reports in “The Charter Difference” that high school charter student achievement is roughly equivalent to the city’s neighborhood schools. The Sun-Times has more:

Chicago’s charter high schools enroll fewer poor, special education and limited-English students; average nine more days of school a year and 40 more minutes of classes a day—yet don’t perform much better than city neighborhood high schools, the new report claims. [...]

Last year, Chicago charter high school kids produced an average ACT score of 16.71 versus 15.82 in neighborhood high schools—not a statistically significant difference, researchers said. However, the neighborhood kids showed far better ACT gains over three years.

The same goes (PDF) for some elementary schools, a team of researchers led by UIC education professor Pauline Lipman found.

So what’s driving the city’s reorganization plan? Lipman quantifies an element of Renaissance 2010 that has infuriated neighborhood groups and families on the move because of gentrification:

[P]lanned school closings are disproportionately in areas experiencing large changes in house prices. They are in areas that have experienced, are experiencing, or are adjacent to areas with large changes in median house price, which suggests there may be a correlation between school closings and gentrification.

In many of those cases, low enrollment has been cited for the closures. But the numbers tell another story. Lipman and fellow researchers point out that many of the city’s best performing schools, which are incidentally located in more established and affluent neighborhoods, have equally low enrollment. There’s no talk about closing them down, though. Rather they’re awarded with more autonomy (PDF).

There’s no question that CPS needs an overhaul. And, as we’ve noted before, some of the most innovative school programs, like the Austin Polytechnical Academy, have been pulled together by private interests within the Renaissance 2010 structure. But the emerging pattern -- in which CPS displaces poor children only to upgrade their schools and hand them off off to private companies that cater to fewer of the neediest students -- obviously weighs down the system elsewhere. CPS’ lack of research to prove otherwise only reinforces the need for a moratorium on school closures.

UPDATE: Mechanics' Ramsin Canon reports that Rep. Cynthia Soto's bill to institute a one-year moratorium on school closings passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Commitee by a vote of 20-0.