School District Consolidation empowered teachers unions and decreased social capital.
Back-to-school season, now under way, once meant a rush to buy student supplies, from No. 2 pencils to notebooks. Now it routinely highlights the tension between failing public- school districts essentially run by teachers unions and the achievements of the school-choice movement, as exemplified by charter-school networks like the Knowledge is Power Program and Success Academies.
Teachers unions emerged as power brokers in the 1960s, as seen in the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike. But don’t overlook the role played by a different big-government education “reform” movement: school-district consolidation.
There were more than 117,000 local school districts in the U.S. in the 1939-40 school year. The distance between individual voters and local school boards was small. But between 1930 and 1970, consolidation eliminated 90% of school districts and two-thirds of schools. This transformed “the small, informal, community-controlled schools of the nineteenth century into centralized, professionally run educational bureaucracies,” as education historian Christopher Berry has written.
This has affected both educational outcomes and the relationship among neighbors. Small government creates social capital: neighbors working together to ensure good schools. In rural districts, teachers might even live alongside parents—in the same town or even the same house.
All this fell away in the face of the misguided drive for efficiency and professionalism that experts thoughtwould improve educational outcomes and cost-effectiveness. Today, there are only 13,318 local school districts in the U.S., including the sprawling citywide districts of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The dreams of education professionals have proved elusive, if declines in reading and math scores are any indication.
