RALEIGH – In scoping out the fiscal impact of any public policy, you have to make sure that you set your zoom wide enough to capture all the effects without going so wide that you can no longer see the details. Know what I mean? Whether you are getting your bearings on MapQuest or trying to copy an oddly shaped original onto a standard-size sheet of paper, you have to find the sweet spot between cutting off important information and turning the fine print into the can’t-find print.
A good example of getting the ratio wrong is North Carolina’s longstanding policy of encouraging multiple school districts in a county to merge into a single administrative unit. The merger movement began in the late 1960s with the best of intentions: to combat de jure or de facto segregation. Often, city systems had significant numbers of minority students while county systems did not. Merger, often coupled with student reassignment and cross-town busing, served as a primary means to rectify past and current educational wrongs.
Later, the stated rationale shifted from desegregation to efficiency. Because merged school districts could spread fixed administrative costs over a larger student population, it was argued, taxpayers come out ahead without sacrificing the quality of the output. That is still the argument used by merger advocates such as Sen. Tony Rand (D-Cumberland), who has long favored enacting a state policy to use the state budget to force North Carolina’s remaining city systems to merge with their counties.
On Monday, the Winston-Salem Journal reported that Davidson County, fearing precisely the kind of state imposition that Rand favors, is poised to study how best to merge its county system with the city systems in Lexington and Thomasville.
While integration and efficiency were worthwhile goals, making school districts larger was not the right way to achieve them. As my Carolina Journal colleagues and I have discussed several times in the past, the results of school-district mergers are often strikingly different than their supporters promise. Administrative spending and costs per student tend to rise, not fall, as you go up the scale in district enrollment. Massive districts the size of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Wake, and Guilford are way, way too large to manage effectively. Parents feel overwhelmed, powerless, and angered by frequent assignments and social-engineering schemes. Politicians battle incessantly over regional priorities. Those dissatisfied with current policies or leadership – be they families or teachers – can’t just move across town into another district. They have to leave the county. And as for racial balance, merged districts don’t necessarily translate into merged schools, much less merged classrooms. Using magnet programs and innovation are preferable to compulsion in pursuing such goals, and more politically sustainable in the long run.
This is not the way things work in many states with better-performing public schools than North Carolina. They have a larger number of districts per county. The available research seems to suggest that, everything else being equal, smaller districts tend to produce at least modestly better academic results.
Here’s where the zoom comes in. If you look only at state allocations for administrative costs, you might conclude, as did a report from the legislative staff last year, that North Carolina could save $11 million a year by merging the remaining systems. But broaden the viewing field. If other costs not funded by the state go up because the merged district suffers from a diseconomy of scale, the taxpayer lose. If larger districts are less effective at teaching students and keeping them in school, that further increases the cost. On balance, it’s likely that merging the final districts won’t save $11 million but will cost far more than that in wasteful spending, remediation, and repeated grades.
Forcing local school systems to merge is a clear case of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. It would be a better use of the General Assembly’s time to study how to break up North Carolina’s largest county systems into smaller, maximally diverse, and easily traversed districts more likely to meet students’ needs, parents’ expectations, and taxpayers’ demands for cost-effective education.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.