RALEIGH – Remember that famous old tree falling in the deserted woods? The correct answer to that “riddle,” if you believed in objective reality, was that of course the tree really did tumble to the ground even if there was no one around to see or hear it. But change the scenario slightly: instead of it just toppling of its own accord, imagine that the tree was chopped down, pulped, and turned into paper on which was printed a government report or research study. In that case, the answer is different: if there were no reporters around to cover it, the whole thing never happened.
Well, I exaggerate a bit. There are a few folks around, policymakers as well as political junkies and policy nerds, who read all the way through studies and reports. We in the think tank business love them. They are our primary audience. Unfortunately, they are few. Most people get their information about government reports or research findings from a blurb in the paper or on the local news.
When this is a problem, it is a big problem. Readers, listeners, or viewers can get a grossly distorted picture based on a sentence or two lifted from an executive summary or press release that might itself have been an incomplete or confused reflection of the underlying findings. A good example of the phenomenon happened last month in Wake County, when a long-awaited report from a private consultant appeared to show that the costs of the system’s public-school facilities were at the average of seven other districts to which Wake was compared.
This is not at all what the data in the consultant’s report to the Wake County Citizens’ Facilities Committee actually showed. In fact, the report’s findings confirmed previous research suggesting that Wake County’s schools cost more, and in some areas tremendously more, than school costs in other, comparable jurisdictions.
I’ll not cast the blame for mistaken reporting entirely on the media organizations involved, which included both print and broadcast outlets. They were led to their erroneous conclusions by the way the report was summarized, and by the way public officials sought to spin the results.
The discrepancy is not hard to explain. In order to compare how much it costs to house students in various school districts, you have to know at least two separate things: 1) the per-foot cost of building the facilities, preferably adjusted for differences in overall construction prices in the jurisdictions; and 2) the square footage to be constructed, often usefully expressed as an amount per student.
In Wake’s case, the per-foot numbers are rarely far out of line with the average for public-school districts. I can’t tell you the number of times over the years that Wake school staffers have responded to charges of building-program inefficiency, from me or others, by hawking updated cost-per-foot numbers. I can tell you, however, that it’s the same number of times I’ve responded with, “So what?”
To use only the per-foot numbers to “debunk” allegations of excessive cost is like saying two individuals who consume the same shares of calories derived from proteins, fats, and carbohydrates are on the same diet, even though one is consuming 4,000 calories a day and the other only 2,000 calories. That would be silly. One is clearly eating a lot more than the other. A difference in girth is the likely result.
Wake’s school designs are inefficient with space. The data in the new consultant report support that observation. The space standard for Wake’s elementary schools was 23 percent higher in square footage per student than the average of the districts studied. It was 22 percent higher for middle schools, while Wake’s high schools were somewhat less spacious that the average.
When you put the two figures together – cost per foot and feet per student – Wake’s elementary costs are way out of line with the average, $21,230 per student vs. $14,043. The gap is significant but smaller for middles, at $19,603 in Wake vs. $17,078 for the average. Wake’ high schools were only slightly more expensive, at $23,966 vs. $22,989 for the average.
If the schools to be funded with the proceeds from last November’s successful bond referendum in Wake County had been redesigned to bring overall costs in line with the average computed from the data in the consultant’s report – not exactly an exacting standard, by the way, as we are still talking about public-school districts – taxpayers would have saved something in the order of $165 million while accommodating exactly the same number of students.
There are lessons here for all of us. Reporters need to read more closely and skeptically. Media consumers should seek out the original documents whenever possible to get the full story, and in some cases simply the true story. And government officials and contractors should remember that their duty is to provide complete and accurate information to the public, not to disguise, embellish, or confuse.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.