As school children head back to class this fall, the hangover from pandemic school policies continues to buffet public education. The stubborn refusal by big city school systems to remain open during COVID has sparked all manner of backlash. Some parents realized that charter and parochial schools remained open, and those students did not suffer learning loss. Others discovered, to their dismay, the politically tinged curricula put in front of their children. Many voted with their feet to leave big city public schools such as New York City’s, whose school system has lost nearly 100,000 students, an enrollment drop similar to other systems that insisted on remaining closed for long periods.
Still others, with less fanfare, have found themselves to be the targets of “deconsolidation” movements: efforts to break up big city systems into smaller, independent, suburban-style districts where parents would exercise more control and teachers unions less. A proposal to break up the Milwaukee public school district into eight smaller districts passed the Wisconsin legislature this year (only to be vetoed by the state’s Democratic governor). But the most energetic attempt to cut a big school district down to size is ongoing in metro Las Vegas.
There is an active effort to allow smaller cities in the Clark County School District, which, with 300,000 students, represents the nation’s fifth-largest, to incorporate their own smaller, independent districts. This would mean the districts in Nevada that were once joined, such as the 12 in Clark County that existed prior to being merged, would gain the right to “deconsolidate.” A leader of the Community Schools Initiative, Henderson City Council member Dan Stewart, describes the Clark County school district as “unmanageable, nonfunctional.”
There are any number of reasons to find smaller school districts attractive. Smaller government is more closely accountable to voters. Parental interests will be less likely to be swamped by the interests of the teachers unions that played such a big role in keeping big city school districts closed during the pandemic.
But the idea suggests a question, as well. Aren’t there sound, historical reasons why big city school systems are so large? Surely, they can be more efficient, buying supplies in bulk, for instance, or needing fewer administrators.
A fair question. But as it turns out, the fact that New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and other cities have only one citywide school district was not the result of careful examination at all. Instead, it was an unexamined side effect of a brief historical period in which once-independent towns close to big cities thought it was in their general interest to be annexed — often to gain access to inexpensive clean water and other big city services. What’s more, the best studies of the optimum size for a school district find it to be far smaller than New York’s 919,000 or the 616,000 in the Los Angeles Unified School District. There are no cost savings once districts are larger than just 4,000 students.
History tells a complex story about the creation of our supersized school districts, about rural schools consolidating for good reasons and big city districts expanding, as a result of factors that have nothing to do with education.
Since the early 20th century, the number of school districts in the United States has sharply decreased. Federal Department of Education data indicate that the total fell from 117,108 in 1939 to 13,588 by 2010. Much of the consolidation reflects the long-term trend away from one-room, rural schoolhouses and the merger of previously remote systems. Those are just the sort of consolidations that economists Matthew Andrews, William Duncombe, and John Yinger have found to make economic sense. Yet the superficially attractive idea that larger districts will make it possible to reduce expenditures (e.g., superintendents) turns out not to hold up.
Duncombe and Yinger’s study of 12 actual consolidations in New York state concluded that savings would result when a 300-student district doubled in size (22.8% savings) but that as districts grew larger, savings declined and disappeared. If that same 300-student district expanded to 1,500 students, savings would total just 3.2% — and beyond there, it would see little or no savings. Of the 100 largest school districts, it’s New York City, the largest of all, that spends the most per pupil, more than $25,000.
But the history of New York schools shows that the goal of school district efficiency had nothing to do with the consolidation of the once-independent districts in Brooklyn, western Queens, and Staten Island that took place when the governments of those boroughs merged with that of Manhattan, creating the City of Greater New York in 1898. Indeed, in a key memo to the state legislature from the leader of the consolidation movement, Andrew Haswell Green, there is no mention of schools at all. Green was focused almost entirely on the need for a single authority overseeing New York ports. “New York, Brooklyn, Long Island City, Jersey City, and all the communities around the port have a common interest in keeping open to the fullest communications with the interior, and this result and other common interests can be best accomplished by united efforts and by forces directed from One united municipality.”
There was, to be sure, no evident concern about the size of the newly created school districts, attended by some 500,000 students in 1902, when the city’s population was just 3.4 million.
Non-education motivations similarly drove the growth of other big cities, with the growth in their public school systems a collateral effect. In Philadelphia, the Consolidation Act of 1854, which expanded the city to include once-independent towns within Philadelphia County, passed, as one account puts it, because “supporters believed the measure would enable municipal authorities to deal with the epidemics of riot and disease that ravaged the city in the 1830s and 1840s, while giving them the power and dignity to challenge for metropolitan supremacy.” Independent towns such as Kensington and Southwark had been hit by anti-Catholic riots. What’s more, local leaders yearned to overtake New York as the nation’s largest city. As the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia puts it, “Perhaps most importantly, though, supporters of consolidation believed that only a united Philadelphia would have the power and status to overtake New York in the struggle for metropolitan supremacy, a race the city had languished in for at least three decades.”
Similar histories characterize the growth of the Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles citywide systems. Brighton, Massachusetts, approved a merger with Boston in 1873 to gain help in cleaning up stockyards to clear the way for residential development. Hyde Park joined Boston in 1912 to gain access to water. In Chicago, annexation of nearby towns in the 19th century was approved by voters eager for better sewage systems, as well as reliably clean water. As the Encyclopedia of the City of Chicago puts it, “Suburban voters favored annexation when they were dissatisfied with the quantity, quality, or cost of public services, particularly sanitary services. The importance of a water system for effective fire protection played a role.”
Water, not surprisingly for anyone who has seen Chinatown, played a role in the annexation of once-independent towns into Los Angeles. As the Los Angeles Times has written of the city’s origins, “The current behemoth is the heroic creation of civic will and water in the first two decades of this century. Hollywood, Wilmington-San Pedro, Watts, Venice — one by one, townships came into the fold, at once lured and coerced by the prospects of the Owens Valley water.” Later, the prospect of suburban real estate development and its tax revenues drove the annexation of the San Fernando Valley area. So it is that the Los Angeles school district calls itself “unified.”
But even as consolidation increased, one part of the education landscape resisted: growing U.S. suburbs. Once suburban towns could gain access to their own water supplies, and once they grew prosperous enough to support a wide range of city services, including public education, annexation ground to a halt in most of the country. (An exception is Houston, which has the right to annex without the consent of the towns it has swallowed.)
The growth of the Clark County School District in Las Vegas is as much a historical accident as that of its older Eastern counterparts. The Nevada legislature moved in 1956 to consolidate some 200 small school districts, many in rural areas, into single districts for each county. In Clark County, those 18 districts were combined. But that was a time when the county population was just 100,000; it stands today at 2.3 million.
Thus, the contemporary configuration took shape: large, center-city school systems often surrounded by a patchwork of much smaller suburban districts. As Dartmouth economist William Fischel has noted, once the described wave of big city annexations was over, most school consolidations were in rural areas — closing what were once large numbers of one-room schoolhouses. Suburbs surrounding the big cities chose to remain independent.
So it is that parents in Clark County and elsewhere are seeking to have the same sort of smaller, independent, and often more effective districts they see in other parts of the country. Those are the districts that compete on the basis of quality — and where there have been far fewer teacher strikes, even as teachers unions became active and powerful starting in the 1960s. One may see teacher strikes in New York but not in Scarsdale, in Chicago but not in Winnetka, in Oakland but not in Marin County. And thousands of small districts stayed open during the pandemic, avoiding the rampant learning loss seen in mammoth districts. As the Washington Post has reported, “in the country’s largest school systems, such as those in New York City, Los Angles, DC and Chicago, teachers unions and concerned parents fought plans to reopen. … Yet thousands of school districts — typically small ones in conservative-leaning areas” — chose to stay open.
Our supersized, big city school districts, marred by low student achievement and high costs, are an accident of history. It’s no wonder that some big city parents are alive to the prospect of enjoying the same sort of influence and sense of community as their suburban counterparts. It’s a movement that doesn’t shed the same kind of sparks as protests about critical race theory, but it may be just as consequential.
Howard Husock is a senior fellow in domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on municipal government, urban housing policy, civil society, and philanthropy. He is the author of the paper “The virtues of American localism — and its 21st-century challenges.“
