The closure of low-performing schools is an essential feature of the charter school model. Our regression
discontinuity analysis uses an exogenous source of variation in school closure—an Ohio law that requires
charter schools to close if they fail to meet a specific performance standard—to estimate the causal effect
of closure on student achievement. The results indicate that closing low-performing charter schools eventually
yields achievement gains of around 0.2–0.3 standard deviations in reading and math for students
attending these schools at the time they were identified for closure. The study also employs mandatory
closure as an instrument for estimating the impact of exiting low-quality charter schools, thus providing
plausible lower-bound estimates of charter school effectiveness. These results complement the more
common lottery-based estimates of charter school effects, which likely serve as upper-bound estimates
due to their focus on oversubscribed schools often located in cities with high-performing charter sectors.
We discuss the implications for research and policy