Smaller Schools
Smaller Districts
"Minority public schools in the United States are concentrated in states that have large school districts and school districts that have large schools." (Could this be one reason why minorities are struggling to improve?)
- From 'School and School District Size Relationships: Costs, Results, Minorities, and Private School Enrollments' by Robert W. Jewell, University of Chicago
School District Boundaries HB77-1s
by Rep. David N. Cox
2SHB77 passed the Utah State Senate and House concurrence March 1. It now goes to the Governor for signing, which is expected. As amended, it will allow cities of the 1st or 2nd class (60,000 residents or more) to create their own school district by a vote of the people in that community. Smaller cities and unincorporated areas are permitted to band together to fulfill the resident requirement.
Other details of the bill state that the new district adopts the employee contract of the old district. The state superintendent is to review the boundaries after a successful election to make any recommendations for changes in the boundaries to include areas outside the city that would be better served by that district. The old district could not be left with less than 3000 students. Once an election passes, the process takes about 20 months before the new district separation is complete. Assets and liabilities are divided proportionately. Employees are allowed an additional year to transfer to either district without loss of seniority or standing.
Why is the bill needed? Due to growth our local educational agencies have become huge, regional, monopolies. This is causing citizens to lose faith in public education and fuels demands for alternatives such as charter schools, home schooling, and privatizing of schools. These are distracting to the districts’ educational mission and siphon off needed resources and time. To preserve a unified and responsive public education, we need to return districts to a community size. District administrations have refused to do this, therefore the need for the legislation to allow communities that are large enough to do this.
If we allow citizens to create one-school school districts (called charter schools), which have no tax base, shouldn’t we allow cities to create a unified school district that serves their community better than the current regional monopoly?
What evidences have we that this is the problem and the right solution?
- There were several quotes in this article I found revealing (italics added).
The Public Choice of Educational Choice
(Lawrence W. Kenny, Department of Economics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32611-7140 Accepted: 1 March 2005)
“Having more (school) districts (in a metropolitan area) produces a better matching of desired school quality with offered school quality and makes it easier for parents to judge whether some school districts are inefficient.”
There is indeed evidence that the public schools are more efficient (i.e., test scores are higher, holding various inputs into learning constant) in metropolitan areas where there are more school districts.”
“Vouchers have been proposed to foster more competition between public and private schools.” “But surprisingly there has been little concern about the limited competition among school districts in states that restrict the formation of school districts.”
“Public schools have been found to be less effective in areas with little competition among public school districts (Zanzig 1997) and in states that leave voters with little latitude to determine education spending or that meddle in local decisions (Husted and Kenny 2000).”
“Many very large school districts appear to be inefficient. This may be because there is little effective competition facing districts covering large geographic areas or because there is less parental monitoring of large school districts due to low incentives to be politically active.”
There is “more support for vouchers… in large inefficient schools,”
“Voucher bills have been passed only in the more conservative Republican states, and almost all of the successful voucher programs have been targeted at large, struggling school districts.”
“All but one (Florida’s state-wide voucher and it is a state of very large districts as well) of the voucher plans that have been enacted have targeted vouchers at large urban school districts, where schools appear to be less efficient. The availability of a large school district to target helps explain voucher success in Republican states.”
Most of the successful voucher proposals have targeted large failing school districts. This strategy obviously is impossible if there are no large school districts in the state to target.”
- The following quotes come from: Big Trouble: Solving Education Problems Means Rethinking Super-Sized Schools and Districts by Rep. David N. Cox, Sutherland Institute, 2002.
Antonucci found that there are “penalties of scale.” Instead of making up a larger percentage of the budget as school districts size increases, the percentage spent on teachers, books, and teaching materials goes down! He writes, “Paradoxically, the larger a school district gets, the more resources it devotes to secondary or even non-essential activities.”5 McGuire, in a 1989 study found, “As specialization in staff grows, program offerings expand, and administrative personnel increase, problems of coordination and control also increase. And in large systems, time and energy are more likely to be shifted away from core service activities.”14 Antonucci also writes, “And let’s not forget the labor implications. Which district is more likely to have difficult contract negotiations or work stoppages? The district with 15 bus drivers, or the one with 677 bus drivers?”
1999 Utah administrative costs per pupil show little difference between large districts and small unless one gets below 1000 students. Below 1000 students the administrative costs go up. (See Figure 1) The three lowest districts in administrative cost per student were Logan with 5,840 students - $181 cost per student (cps), South Sanpete with 2,878 students - $198 cps, and Juab with 1796 students - $207 cps. Alpine with 45,208 is next with $237 cps.16 In the 2000 legislative audit on class size reduction monies, the smaller districts were better able to account for specific funding than big districts because the big district budgets were so complicated.
(This study was extended three consecutive years with the same results.)Nor have bigger districts necessarily provided better education. Cotton, in her review of 100 research projects observes that, “The states with the largest schools and school districts have the worst achievement, affective, and social outcomes.”
Comparisons with Utah school districts 1997-2000 SAT scores are revealing. (See Figure 2) In both 5th and 8th grade test scores, the smallest districts score highest within their expected range (99% and 74% of expected range). Medium small districts score next highest (65% and 47%), medium size score next (54% & 37%), with the largest districts scoring lowest in their expected range (36% & 32%).
Utah’s big districts have public perceptions that the other side of the district is getting more benefit than their side. Davis and Alpine’s north and south sides and Granite and Jordan’s east and west sides have fought each other for years over which direction the tax dollars are flowing. Smaller districts may be more likely to pass bonds because the community as a whole would see the need and feel the benefit. They would not have to fight another community for political power and tax dollars. They would not have to take from another area for their own benefit with the resulting negative feelings.
According to the 1999 Fall Enrollment Report from USOE, 85% of Utah’s high school students are in schools that research show are too big. Utah is among the highest in district size. It may not be possible to build smaller schools without creating smaller districts.
Back in 1989, Walberg intimated the following as what we could expect as a result of becoming too big. He listed:
- declarations of educational bankruptcy and state appointment of “receiverships” of new boards and central staff;
- breaking up large-city districts into free-standing smaller units;
- suits by parents for failing to employ state-of-the-art educational practices;
- litigation by graduates for fraudulent services and diplomas;
- magnet schools and choice plans within and outside districts and the public sector;
- vouchers and tax rebates for private or public tuition.
He further wrote, “These schemes are motivated by the desperation of some legislators, business people, citizens, and parents who wish to employ the courts or market-like competition to improve the efficiency of schools, particularly those in large districts, that seem unable to respond constructively to their clients and society.”
Setting a limit on the size for both districts and schools and creating an orderly way for setting up these new districts, will achieve better academics and a more efficient use of tax dollars long term.
- Smaller Districts Work Too, Rural Policy Matters, November 2000
Poverty’s power (to pull down student achievement) was always weaker in smaller schools than in larger ones, but among both larger and smaller schools, it was weaker in those operating in smaller districts. The result has real implications for the growing movement to break up large schools in urban districts. The interaction effect between school and district size indicates that poverty’s power over achievement within large districts might be lowered by 40 percentage points by doing nothing more than reducing school size within the district. On the other hand, it might be reduced by as much as 60 percentage points by reducing both school size and district size.
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Two quotes: Thomas Jefferson and Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi
- Finally, more research and commentary nationwide is available here at SmallerSchools.org.
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