This new MRDC study examines the relative costs of approximately 200 small New York City public high schools that were created between 2002 and 2008. These schools serve mostly disadvantaged kids and are located in buildings where larger high schools with low levels of achievement had been closed. Earlier and recent randomized evaluations have found that attending a small school increased graduation rates by roughly 9 percentage points compared to other NYC public high schools. This new study asks how it cost to achieve that improvement. Analysts use five years of school-expenditure data for roughly 8,500 students who were first-time ninth graders in 2005 and 2006; they represent 84 of the 123 original set of small schools—the same sample used to estimate effects on five-year graduation rates. First, analysts examine per-pupil operating costs for the small schools compared to all other district high schools (including actual individual teacher salaries) and find that they are higher, likely because small schools can’t take advantage of economies of scale. Yet when they look into the relative cost of the intervention itself, based on its earlier demonstrated impact on graduation rates, they find two things: (1) expenditures during each of the first four years of high school are not statistically different for students in small schools versus those in other city high schools; (2) yet expenditures dropped for the small-schools cohorts because fewer of them needed a fifth year of high school (they were more likely to graduate in four years). In fact, fifth-year enrollment rates were one-third higher for the control group. As a result, they estimate that the cost per graduate for those who attended small schools is 16 percent lower than the cost per graduate for those in the control group. And that doesn’t include the income benefits for the student who graduates from high school versus dropping out. The positive impacts of small schools continue to roll in; this initiative appears not to be the disaster that many thought it was. Unfortunately, in education, we rarely have the fortitude to allow interventions to play out and observe results over the long term. Perhaps we should be more patient.
SOURCE: Robert Bifulco and Rebecca Unterman, “The Relative Costs of New York City’s New Small Public High Schools of Choice,” MRDC (October 2014).
