Kati Hancock, the director of The Education Trust, a research group in Washington that studies school issues, said there was "no secret about what's going on here".
The national timetable this year "has been really tight for a true turnaround," said Robin Lake, a University of Washington researcher who studies school overhauls.
Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who studies school accountability systems, said the inherent danger in closing schools is its potential negative effect on the most vulnerable students.
In addition to undergraduate studies, Illinois State offers master's degree programs in most areas and doctoral degrees in biological sciences, English studies, school psychology, and several areas of education.
"No one is doing it, and when you ask people why they're not doing it, they shrug their shoulders," said Jennifer Jennings, a sociologist at New York University who studies school accountability.
"The more you find out about each of these cases, the more it makes sense," said Prof. Dewey G. Cornell, a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia and director of the Virginia Youth Violence Project, which studies school safety and violence prevention.
