RALEIGH – Politicians, political activists, and even some political commentators are frequently accused of failing to see the forest for the trees. I agree this is a problem – regarding everyone else, of course – but would submit that there is another one with greater ramifications. Sometimes, political actors fail to see the clearing for the trees. That is, they fixate on a few big trunks of a problem, or spend all their time looking upward into the foliage, while missing the fact that what lies ahead is an entirely different landscape.

I think we are seeing such a case in North Carolina right now, involving the consolidation of public-school districts. For decades, it has essentially been the policy of state government to merge smaller districts into larger one. From the late-1960s until the 1990s, the argument for consolidation was largely a racial one. For understandable reasons, leaders contended that only by merging city and county systems together – typically an urban district with a substantial minority population and a county district without one – could the vestiges of discrimination be combated and the educational value of integration realized.

The saliency of this argument having dissipated, in part because of continued and widespread voter opposition to forced busing, advocates of consolidation began to emphasize more the potential cost savings of eliminating redundant administrative bureaucracies and taking advantage of economies of scale in buying goods or services. That’s the stated reason for more-recent drives to eliminate the remaining city school system in North Carolina, such as a proposal likely to get a hearing this summer in the General Assembly to eliminate state administrative funding for those systems, in an obvious bid to compel them to capitulate to consolidation.

But while state officials have fixated on the means of accomplishing their longtime end of merger, the politics and policy dynamics have changed. In systems such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County, each with well over 100,000 students, as well as among a larger swath of districts in the 30,000 to 70,000 range, there is vocal and growing support for deconsolidating the school district to yield more manageable units. In part, native-born Carolinians are properly questioning whether there has been any cost savings or educational value from consolidation, and are seeking ways to engineer a more accessible and accountable public-education system. And in part, new Carolinians from the Northeast or Midwest, where local communities typically feature many more districts from which to choose, are wondering why local officials believe bigger is better.

Bigger is not better. All other things being equal, perhaps combining administrative functions would save money, but these things are never equal. Districts with enrollments well over 25,000, and certainly above 100,00, have moved past the economy-of-scale stage into the diseconomy-of-scale stage (HTML version of PDF), in which additional students actually increase the per-pupil cost (for a variety of managerial and political reasons). Furthermore, as I reported last year, new research suggests that the educational benefits of consolidation are questionable at least, and at most there would actually be educational benefits from deconsolidation.

In response to the defeat of a big school bond in Charlotte-Mecklenburg last year, a citizen task force recommended that the CMS district be divided into sub-districts with management closer to schools and parents. That’s not far enough, but it does reflect the direction I suspect things will go over time (the task force, co-chaired by former Mayor Harvey Gantt, was not populated mostly or even significantly by conservatives).

It’s time for state lawmakers to cast their eyes down the path a bit. They’ll see a lot of daylight ahead.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.