RALEIGH – Speaker Jim Black of Mecklenburg County was certainly busy last week. In addition to clinching a narrow 61-59 win on the House floor for a government lottery, he also appears to have cheered on a House committee when it snuffed out a bill from two fellow Mecklenburg lawmakers to allow their public-school district to deconsolidate.

The move proved to be unpopular back home. The panel voted the bill down on Thursday. By Friday, Black was backtracking, indicating that while he didn’t like the legislation, he was yielding to requests from both sides that the issue get a more substantive airing than a sudden, unceremonious bud-nipping.

The political class in Raleigh doesn’t know what to make of all this, to be honest. Break up a school district? They’re under the impression that all right-thinking North Carolinians have been committed for the better part of 30 years to reducing the number of districts through mergers. It was just a decade ago that Guilford creating the state’s third-largest district by merging Greensboro, High Point, and the county school systems. A couple of years ago, it was Cleveland County’s turn when it absorbed Shelby and Kings Mountain schools (though not without a legal tussle). And in Orange County, the perennial idea of merging the Chapel Hill-Carrboro system with the county’s has been perennially nixed, but remains a hot topic of conversation.

So when the political establishment saw hundreds of parents rallying at various locales around Charlotte-Mecklenburg to demand serious consideration of breaking up the system – and a similar effort simmering in the second-largest district, Wake County – the only conceivable explanations were damning. These parents must be ignorant, racist, or Republican (actually, the “or” is my idea, probably not theirs).

Wrong. As usual, Raleigh is living about 10 to 15 years behind the rest of the country on matters of public policy, though it fancies itself a leader. For many years now, education analysts have noted the growing body of evidence suggesting the large schools and large school districts, far from necessarily conferring educational benefits and saving money through economies of scale, may actually hamper effective instruction while costing more money through diseconomies of scale.

Interestingly, one piece from 2000 used a threshold of 100,000 students to identify a district size above which it appears that administrative and non-instructional costs actually rise rather than fall. It just so happens that in North Carolina, only Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake are over that size, though I’m willing to bet that the real threshold for the diseconomy of scale in school districts is significantly lower than 100,000, perhaps half to a third of that.

The very problems these parents are complaining about – a labyrinthine bureaucracy, unresponsive leaders, elaborate social-engineering schemes disguised as student reassignment– are predictable symptoms of an organization that has exceeded its optimal size and scope.

Let me be clear about this: I don’t think that deconsolidation would solve as many problems as some of its proponents seem to think. Higher standards, more competition, and more parental choice are attractive options no matter how big the district is. But the idea clearly deserves a closer look – and in extreme cases, such as the CMS and Wake behemoths, it is highly likely that current arrangements cost more than they save, financially and in other ways.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.