Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary film “Super Size Me,” with its shocking depiction of dietary excess in the American fast-food industry, forever put the lie to the notion that bigger is better. While supersizing has since fallen out of favor at McDonald’s, it is still front and center in the lexicon of public education bureaucrats. Over the past 60 years, administrators have increasingly moved to supersize many school districts, creating a new generation of mega systems, which serve more than 100,000 students. The move to consolidate has led to district mergers everywhere, whittling the total of school districts nationally from 117,108 in 1940 to just 14,465 in 2003.
Fortunately, a movement to buck this trend and break up oversized school districts is picking up steam around the country. In April, Nebraska’s legislature passed a bill and quickly signed into law by Gov. Heineman to deconsolidate Omaha’s school district. Fueled by a desire for greater local control, the new law will divide Omaha’s 45,000-student system into three smaller districts by 2008. Opponents predict long-term litigation, saying the plan legislates segregation and creates racially homogeneous school districts.
But supporters see the plan’s deconsolidation as a move to empower parents, as it allows voter-elected school boards to lead each district. The law also enhances local control and parental choice by permitting interdistrict student transfers between the proposed Omaha systems and 10 surrounding districts. Legislators view downsizing as a necessary reform and critical route to better schools: Sen. Ernie Chambers, Nebraska’s only black state lawmaker, said, “The only way we have a shot at improving things is to make it possible for the people whose children attend these schools to have control over them and what goes on in them.”
Debate over deconsolidation has traveled west to Clark County, Nev., as well. Home to the fifth-largest school district in the country, Clark County serves a whopping 292,000 students. State Sen. Sandra Tiffany has tried unsuccessfully to break up the district for more than a decade, claiming the large bureaucracy makes education impersonal and unresponsive. But thanks to the 2006 gubernatorial race, downsizing school districts has now become politically palatable. Candidate and U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons is calling for deconsolidation, saying smaller districts will foster greater accountability and school improvement.
Lawmakers in North Carolina are not yet on the deconsolidation bandwagon, but that could change if parents in the state’s two largest districts (Wake and Mecklenburg) have their way. In 2005, students, parents and community leaders met across Mecklenburg County to discuss splitting up North Carolina’s largest school system of 126,903 students. The resulting deconsolidation bill met with a quick defeat in Raleigh. But expect a resurgence of interest as crowding and discipline problems mount and student performance remains stagnant. Unabated growth in Wake County, the state’s second largest school system, has some parents weighing the merits of deconsolidation. Fortunately, North Carolina’s median district size of 6,619 students means most school districts are still small: 80 of the state’s 115 school systems have fewer than 10,000 students.
While consensus is building that local control and institutional responsiveness fall by the wayside in mega-districts, many still contend that larger districts save valuable education dollars. But what is the economic bottom line? The truth is that supersized systems actually cost more than they save, both financially and academically. Bigger budgets don’t translate into more money in the classroom: an Alexis de Tocqueville Institution study found that as district size increases, the percentage spent on teachers, books, and teaching materials actually goes down. Research continues to show that as school districts grow, graduation rates and student achievement fall.
In the end, supersizing might sound like a good value, but it doesn’t deliver. Mega systems, with multiple layers of bureaucracy, can’t begin to meet individual student needs. When it comes to school district size, less really is more.
Lindalyn Kakadelis is director of the North Carolina Education Alliance.