Make Schools Local Again

By Howard Husock

Thursday, September 30, 2021

 

The many lessons of the COVID pandemic have included an unwelcome one for public-school parents about the outsized power of American teachers’ unions. Even as private schools remained open or reopened, almost half of public-school districts in the United States continued with “hybrid” learning — the unproven combination of Zoom and classroom instruction. In schools with lower achievement levels, there were fewer in-person classes, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Return to Learn Tracker. As events in San Francisco and other cities made clear, it was the teachers’ unions rather than elected officials who had the whip hand when it came to deciding policy — especially in big cities such as Chicago, where teachers threatened to strike.

 

For decades, those concerned about the quality of urban education have focused on increasing school choice through the advent of charter schools — with notable but limited success.  But the pandemic suggests an additional avenue to both competition and citizen accountability: Break up the big-city school districts altogether to give city parents the sort of “vote with your feet” choice that suburban families have, and to deprive unions of the power to shut down school systems with hundreds of thousands of students or, in the case of New York City, nearly 1 million.

 

This is a call not just for “decentralization” of school management but rather for full-on local control whereby a district has its own elected school board that sets property taxes to support the schools. It would allow parents in the Bronx to have as much control over the hiring of superintendents as parents in Scarsdale have; similarly for parents in Chicago and Oak Park; in Boston and Wellesley; in Cleveland and Shaker Heights. Those who are running failing schools would be found not in distant downtown offices but in the neighborhood — and they’d face local voters who would not be outnumbered and outspent by teachers’ unions.

 

Some context is useful. Labor strife has increased in American public schools in recent decades, but it has been concentrated in the large school districts. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ official work-stoppages data on K–12 teachers’ strikes since 1993 reflect unions’ understanding of what amounts to their monopoly market power. Of the 66 strikes during that period, 36 have occurred either through statewide action (a recently increasing leverage of labor) or in one of the 100 largest school districts, including Chi­cago, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Oakland. Strikes have also occurred in an additional four districts that, though not in the top 100, are the largest in their metropolitan area (Buffalo, Dayton, Providence, and Youngstown). Others have occurred in relatively smaller districts in high-poverty cities where the school district is a major employer — which can lead to political influence due to the high number of households with employees (for example, Birmingham, Ala.; East St. Louis, Ill.; and Gary, Ind.). The district’s size can also lead to market power as exercised by other arms of organized labor, such as a strike by unionized school-bus drivers in New York City.

 

What’s more, the proportion of teachers’ strikes relative to other labor strikes has increased over time. In 1993, there were 35 labor strikes documented by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and four were related to K–12 education. In 1994, there were 45 labor strikes, and five were related to K–12 education. Flash forward 20 years. In 2018, there were 20 labor strikes, and eight were related to K–12 education. In 2019, there were 25 labor strikes, and eleven were related to K–12 education. Then came COVID and, with it, the most public displays of teachers’-union power to date.

 

One cannot guarantee that smaller city districts will not be plagued by strikes, but they’ve clearly avoided them so far. For instance, in Westchester County, N.Y., an area with 48 school districts including many characterized by high performance, there were no teacher strikes during the same period (1993–2019) in which Oakland experienced five and Chicago experienced three.

 

Of course, the goal of change should be not merely to rein in a self-interested group — it should be to improve the quality of education. There is solid evidence suggesting this is possible. One prominent analysis suggests that what may superficially appear to be an inefficient arrangement (a large number of school districts in a given area) can contribute to higher-quality education for students. In a widely cited 1994 paper titled “Does Competition among Public Schools Bene­fit Students and Tax­payers?” Stanford economist Caroline M. Hoxby examined the effect of greater public-school choice due to a larger number of independent school districts in a metropolitan area. Hoxby reported that areas with greater opportunities for choice among public schools had lower per-pupil spending, lower teacher salaries, and larger classes. The same areas had better average student performance as measured by students’ educational attainment, future wages, and test scores.

 

The existence and, indeed, persistence of a relatively large number of districts and positive resulting effects are in keeping with economist Charles Tiebout’s long-respected analysis of metropolitan-area political economies. In his 1956 paper “A Pure Theory of Local Expendi­tures,” he posited the idea of the “consumer voter,” who faces choices among competing political jurisdictions, each one of which potentially provides a distinct market basket of public goods, allowing for choice by virtue of residential self-selection. “The consumer-voter may be viewed as picking that community which best satisfies his preference pattern for public goods,” Tiebout wrote. “The greater the number of communities and the greater the variance among them, the closer the consumer may come to fully realizing his preference position.” In the school-district context, more choice improves the position of consumer voters, per Tiebout. This is the drama currently playing out in Atlanta, where residents of the city’s Buckhead section, fed up with crime and poor public services, are seeking state approval to secede.

 

Such an ability to choose also reflects an understanding of the relative power of voters in smaller districts. In big cities, there are not only more union members who are voters, but the millions of dollars from those dues-paying teachers help in running campaigns and in get-out-the-vote drives. The power of individual voters is dwarfed — the special interest overshadows the less organized general interest. This is especially true when school boards are appointed (as in New York) or when elections are held in off years or on obscure days when no other candidates are on the ballot.

 

There is yet another potential good that would come with breaking up the big-city school districts: It would encourage the growth and, indeed, repair of community social fabric. Having one’s own community schools provides the focus for local sports teams, PTA bake sales, and school-band concerts. Such benefits help account for the loyalty of suburban parents to the public-school status quo — they already have choice and have exercised theirs. And schools serve as a community focus — the center of a virtuous circle in which good schools support stable or growing property-tax bases, which even empty nesters have reason to approve. Community schools also, crucially, allow rich and poor households, and those in between, to cooperate on equal footing, with all adults having a vote.

 

This is not to say that the breakup of big-city districts would be easy. Large districts have high levels of bonded in­debted­ness that would have to be apportioned to the new districts. This is complex but not impossible. Drawing district lines would be a delicate process: It would be crucial that no district be so low-income that it couldn’t adequately fund its schools. To be sure, differences in household income would be inevitable. State governments would probably have to help equalize expenditures through a formula for local aid. It would not be acceptable for some districts to have too few textbooks, limited art or music classes, or no sports equipment. Cross-district cooperation could help minimize such differences, however. School districts might want to maintain citywide examination schools such as Stuyvesant High School in New York City, Lowell High School in San Francisco, or Boston Latin School. Or they might wish to join forces in football. Pooling funds for shared goals would not be ruled out, but it would be a community’s choice.

 

There would likely be a temptation to draw district lines to achieve goals of racial and ethnic balance. This could be addressed by including neighborhoods with a range of incomes; indeed, in practice, this is exactly how many established suburban communities function. The poor side of town and the mansions on the hills share the same district. But if a spectrum of incomes does not lead to some theoretically desirable racial balance, we should not substitute quotas. African-American parents — whether in the Jim Crow South or Boston in its troubled school-busing era — have always sought a high-quality education first. Indeed, black members of the school board in Joe Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, Del., circa 1978, resisted busing children to the suburbs. The implicit idea that black and Hispanic children can learn best only when they share classrooms with white children has been soundly debunked by charter schools such as Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies and should not be perpetuated.

 

Since the early 20th century, the number of school districts in the U.S. 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 merger of previously remote systems and the long-term trend away from one-room rural schoolhouses. It also reflects a questionable belief that larger districts are more efficient and effective. But even as consolidation increased, one part of the education landscape resisted: growing suburbs. As Dartmouth economist William Fischel has noted, “consoli­dations in urban and suburban areas account for very little of the overall decline in the total number of districts.” In this way, the contemporary configuration took shape: large, center-city school systems often surrounded by a patchwork of much smaller suburban districts. Just as we rethought whether small rural districts continued to make sense, so is it time to reconsider the effectiveness of their big-city counterparts. It’s time to break them up.