PORTLAND -- A new report from The Maine Heritage Policy Center finds that bigger school systems may be cheaper to run, but the state's smallest school districts outperform them.
The report, Is Bigger that Much Better: School District Size, High School Completion, and Post-Secondary Enrollment Rates in Maine, authored by Stephen Bowen, examined Maine's 15 largest and 15 smallest school districts that provide high school education.
"School reform should focus on getting the best possible outcomes at a value to taxpayers," said Bowen. "Unfortunately, Maine policymakers seem more focused on district size than on working to make successful learning models more affordable."
Maine's 15 largest school districts range in size from 2,800 students in the Biddeford area to the over 7,000 students in the Portland system. Altogether, the 15 biggest districts enroll over 55,000 students, more than a quarter of all the students enrolled in schools statewide. On average, these districts spend $8,033 per pupil. These districts are located primarily in the southern part of the state and enjoy a median household income that is $8,000 more per household than in the smallest districts.
By comparison, the 15 smallest districts supporting high schools enroll little more than 3,000 students combined, fewer than 12 of the 15 largest districts, and are scattered across eight different counties. On average, these districts spend $11,027 per student.
Findings
The smallest districts may spend more, but on measures of high school completion and post-secondary enrollment, they outperform the state's biggest districts.. The 15 smallest districts graduated an average of 91.4 percent of their students in 2005, the most recent year for which data is available. This is six percent more than the 15 largest districts, which graduated only 85 percent of their students that same year.
The smallest districts also have a higher percentage of their students go on to enroll in post-secondary educational opportunities. The small schools enrolled 77 percent of their students in postsecondary programs, compared to less than 72 percent for the state's largest school districts. This is despite the fact that the largest districts are far wealthier.
"Maine's small districts are graduating a higher percentage of their students and sending more of those students onto post-secondary institutions," said Bowen. "They are clearly doing something right, despite their small size. Perhaps policymakers should be looking to emulate these school districts, rather than do away with them through forced consolidation."
In addition to identifying better performance with regard to graduation rates and post- secondary enrollment, Bowen was able to calculate that the long term savings of graduating more students outweighs the nearly $3,000 per student of additional spending done by the smallest districts. A recently released study from the University of California at Santa Barbara calculated that over a lifetime, each student who fails to complete high school in California costs state and local government there more than $80,000 in lost tax revenue and increased heath, welfare, and criminal justice spending.
"If the largest school systems graduated the 91.4 percent of their students that the smallest districts do, they would hand out 3,300 more diplomas, and could save state and local government more than $260 million," writes Bowen. "Conversely, if the smallest districts consolidated into larger ones and brought their per-pupil spending down to level of the largest districts, they'd save about $9 million. But if their dropout rate grew to the same level of the largest districts as a result, they would hand out 182 fewer diplomas. Those 182 students could go on to cost Maine people $14.5 million, far more than the $9 million that would have been saved through consolidation."
"By focusing exclusively on the issue of district size, policymakers and legislators successfully avoided a much tougher and much more necessary discussion about why some school districts succeed and others fail," concludes Bowen. "Finding the answer to that question is a far better use of everyone's time than tinkering with the way our school districts are governed in the hope that simply making them bigger will also make them better."
Bowen outlined an approach back in January that would have encouraged cooperation and collaboration between existing districts without actually merging the districts together. The report, Education Service Districts:Achieving School Administrative Cost Savings While Protecting Local Control and Parental Involvement, outlined a model that would generate savings through the sharing of services while maintaining the kind of smaller, more community-centered school environments that appear to result in higher student achievement.
Bowen's reports are available at: www.mainepolicy.org.
The Maine Heritage Policy Center is a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational organization based in Portland, Maine. The Center formulates and promotes free market, conservative public policies in the areas of economic growth, fiscal matters, health care, and education - providing solutions that will benefit all the people of Maine. Contributions to MHPC are tax deductible to the extent allowed by law.
