Is bigger better? Not when it comes to schools.

Does district consolidation save money? You might think so if you focus on the job of superintendent, a high-dollar job. But consolidation won’t necessarily reduce head count, or even salaries.

The Dayton Daily News looked at the prospect of consolidation in Shelby county, in western Ohio. It observed that the administrative costs of the Russia school district (head count: 460) are about $500,000. If that expense disappeared through consolidation, and similar savings could be obtained by doing away with the state’s 122 smallest districts, then the state as a whole could, theoretically, save $60 million per year.

But how might that work out in real life? The News found a single district in that state that enrolls as many students as the seven rural districts in Shelby county. Lebanon Schools, in Warren county, spends only $400,000 less than the seven rural districts. In other words, vast cost savings are fleeting.

Perhaps that’s because consolidation isn’t a simple mathematical operation of lopping positions from the jobs roll. Take the job of superintendent, for example. Howard Lee, chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Education, observed that after consolidation, “A lot of those superintendents would end up as assistants in charge of various areas.” And mind you, this is from someone who has been a leader in forcing school districts to consolidate.

There are also academic pitfalls. Marty Strange, policy director for the Rural School and Community Trust is no fan of consolidation. Given his job, that’s not surprising. But he points out that district consolidation is not the end game. “District consolidation is always a prelude to school consolidation,” he says. Moving students into bigger schools is contrary to the latest thinking on school size, which is that small is beautiful.

Strange mentions the neighboring state of West Virginia. Over ten years it closed 300 schools. What happened to administrative costs? They went up 16 percent. Granted, we don’t know what would have happened. Bureaucratic growth appears to be a self-perpetuating phenomenon, however, and it gets accelerated as organizations get bigger. For one thing, there are occupational benefits of specialization.

Source: "Consolidation's savings may be fleeting," Dayton Daily News, March 18, 2007. For further reading, see School District Consolidation: An Ineffective Way of Improving Education (PDF), Flint Hills Center for Public Policy.