Arkansas, Arizona, South Dakota, Kansas, Vermont, Iowa and Idaho are presently weighing proposals to reduce the number of school districts within their borders by consolidating some of them into larger units.
Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, responding to a court decision that made the state responsible for providing children with an adequate education, has urged that the number of school districts in Arkansas be cut from 310 to no more than 116. In Arizona, new state school superintendent Tom Horne said that consolidation of his state's 220+ districts would ease administrative costs. In South Dakota, the House education committee recently considered a bill to reduce districts from 176 to 30. In Kansas, a proposal to slash the number from 303 to 30 was being studied. Vermont's legislature is weighing a proposal to shrink the number from 60 to 15. Iowa is pondering financial incentives to encourage consolidations. (In Michigan, they already get a $50 per pupil bonus.) In Idaho, a similar proposal is before the House education committee. And of course New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has effectively merged that city's many "community" districts into a single centralized system.
But this pendulum swings both ways. Oregon is considering proposals to break up large school districts. Los Angeles has often been urged to shear the mammoth LAUSD into 30 or so parts. In Nevada, plans are afoot to break up the huge Clark County (Las Vegas) school district. And Wyoming's legislature recently defeated an attempt at more district consolidation.
Does it matter? Yes, the history of public education suggests that district consolidation - and the inevitable school consolidation that follows - are generally bad ideas. Though proponents promise lower costs and stronger student performance, in practice neither seems to occur. Worse, over the long haul, consolidation sucks power away from parents, students, and local influence into more centralized political arrangements in which teacher unions and other special interests have even more clout. The result has been higher, not lower, per pupil costs and worse education. In the jargon of Economics 101, any economies gained by movements down cost curves have been more than offset by upward shifts in these same curves.
The number of public school districts in the U.S. shrank from 117,000 in 1940 to 15,000 in 2000. The number of public schools fell from 233,000 in the late 1930's to 91,000 in 2000. These two developments caused the average number of pupils per district to rise from 217 in 1940 to 3159 in 2000 and the average school to swell from 127 to 521 pupils.
As everyone knows, these consolidations were accompanied not by amazing new efficiencies but by rising per pupil costs - and costs borne more and more by non-local sources. From the end of World War II to today, real per pupil spending sextupled, even as the local share of public-school funding dwindled from 80% (early 1900s) to 45.4 percent in 2000.
Power follows money to its source. In education, that has meant following it upward to places where adult interest groups are better able both to secure further hikes in school funding and to divert much of the increment toward themselves and their members.
Besides price-escalation, consolidation discourages competition and educational diversity. Caroline Hoxby and Sam Peltzman have found that it adversely affects both the cost of education and the performance of students. Peltzman discovered that deterioration in pupil performance was greatest where the shift in funding from local to state sources was greatest. He also found that the upward movement of power added to union influence.
Consider teacher pay and work rules. Teacher unions bargain at the district level. As districts become larger, negotiators on both sides are farther removed from direct knowledge of individual teachers and schools. District-wide pay schedules and work rules become more detached from the performance of real teachers and schools. Veteran teachers transfer out of inner-city schools. The ultimate union objective is statewide salary schedules and work rules, which already exist in North Carolina and Washington State. These are more readily controlled from the top. A favorite trick is to mandate statewide minimum starting wages that force up entire salary grids.
Perhaps this would still be worth doing if students learned more but, by and large, they have not, at least not lately. The data show gradually improving pupil performance until the early 1960s. From then until the early 1980s, however, scores plummeted, such that, by the end of this period, high school graduates were about one and one-half years behind their predecessors of the early 1960s. There has since been some recovery in scores, but well below what it would have been had the pre-1960s trend continued.
Over the same period, community colleges grew in no small part because they provided remedial help. Moreover, half the private schools in existence in 1994 were founded in the three decades immediately preceding. It is at least plausible that both developments responded to public school and district consolidation and the accompanying declines in pupil performance.
Why should this be? Effective-schools research indicates that achievement is stronger where schools establish a clear identity for students - a community of interest. Yet consolidation pushes the other way. High schools, in particular, became shopping malls. Larger schools necessarily had less sense of community. While diversity may be a plus in other ways, it probably does not square with improved student performance. What's more, all of this occurred as the larger society was fracturing. Ironically, these developments led both to greater homogeneity among schools and more diversity within schools. Both developments eroded student performance, the former by reducing competition among schools and the latter by destroying strong school identities.
Big schools are a problem for other reasons. Many people judge the optimal school size to be about 300-400 students at the elementary level and 400-800 in secondary institutions. Yet fourth-fifths of U.S. elementary students are in schools larger than 400 students and nearly three-quarters of secondary pupils attend schools bigger than 800. By contrast, higher-performing private schools are typically less than half the size of their public counterparts.
Bigger doesn't mean better. More consolidation will push both education costs and student performance in unwanted directions. State policymakers should take note.
John T. Wenders is Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the University of Idaho and a Senior Fellow at The Commonwealth Foundation
