The authors argue that from the perspective of distributive justice, school district fragmentation--meaning both the existing reality of hyper-proliferated school districts and the practice of further breaking larger districts into smaller ones--produces three distinct injustices. First, it undermines racial solidarity and the bonds of community.…

Sixty-five years after the "Brown v. Board" decision, American schools are re-segregated and re-segregating. The mechanisms of this re-segregation are legal action, voluntary moves towards unitary status, unintended consequences of integration-oriented strategies, and an increasing trend towards the fracturing, or splintering of school…

When it comes to education, not all spending is equal. Some education dollars are spent more productively than others. In a time of lagging revenues and flat achievement in many districts, policymakers have increasingly started to pay greater attention to the question of whether education systems are getting the most out of every education dollar.…

The 2013 merger of Memphis City Schools (with 103,000 students) and Shelby County Schools (with 47,000 students) was the largest school district consolidation in American history. In its first year of operation, the new Shelby County Schools (SCS) commissioned CRPE researchers to perform a critical review of the district's readiness to implement a…

This study analyzed the plausibility of merging school districts in New York State. The study considered how consolidation impacts finance, instruction, demographics, and enrollment for 56 public schools in Nassau County of the Long Island region of New York State. It also draws comparisons for county-, township-, and regionally-based school…

Educational policy makers continue to promote non-instructional service consolidation as one method to reduce operating costs through "economies of scale". Unfortunately, there is essentially no empirical evidence on the size or source of cost savings associated with such measures. Using panel data from 2004-2010, this mixed methods…

The author's "School District Consolidation Study in 10 Michigan Counties" study was published in August, 2010 by The Education Policy Center at Michigan State University. It was intended to measure the financial impact of consolidation of schools at the county level akin to other states like Virginia, Florida and Maryland. The study was…

School district consolidation enjoys a unique status among strategies to reduce education costs. It promises to cut spending, without lowering service quality, by improving the efficiency of service delivery. In contrast to strategies aimed at lowering employee salaries or benefits--which are hard to avoid when cutting spending in any labor…

Historically, the number of public school districts in the United States has decreased despite a dramatic increase in the number of students enrolled. Although public school district consolidation has impacted districts of all sizes, since the late 1930's smaller rural districts facing dwindling community resources have merged or consolidated with…

As Duncomb and Yinger (2001) have stated, "School consolidation represents the most dramatic change in education governance and management in the United States in the twentieth century. Over 100,000 school districts have been eliminated through consolidation since 1938, a drop of almost 90 percent (NCES 1999, Table 90). This longstanding…

Several New England states have been rethinking the system whereby small towns make the key decisions about school budgets and staffing under the banner of local control. Maine already has mandated a reduction in the number of local school districts from 290 to 80, allowing localities to vote on the larger districts. This consolidation, unpopular…

School district consolidation is a striking phenomenon. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 117,108 school districts provided elementary and secondary education in 1939-1940. By 2006-2007, the number of districts had dropped to 13,862, a decline of 88 percent. The rate of consolidation has slowed in recent years, but at…

While political philosophers have paid a great deal of attention to providing a theory of secession for cases of nations breaking away from nation-states, little has been said about perhaps the most common type of secession--school district secession. I argue that while there is no principled prohibition against school district secession, there…

In light of a slow economic recovery from the Great Recession, state and local governments are faced with the challenge of providing services to citizens amidst ongoing budgetary woes. For instance, although the most recent Indiana revenue collections for the month of August were above revised projections to help start fiscal year 2011 (which…

This report presents facts and figures on British Columbia's education for 2012. It is divided into the following seven sections: (1) Schools, which covers: (a) Number of public schools; (b) Number of independent (private) schools; (c) School closures; (d) Rural schools and students; (e) School-district amalgamation; and (f) School safety: Seismic…