Consolidating School Districts Won’t Save Michigan $600 Million

Michigan Capitol Confidential ^ | 9/16/2010 | Michael Van Beek

[MichCapCon]

State politicians and media are suddenly abuzz with the concept of consolidating school districts. Gov. Jennifer Granholm wants to spend $50 million to "incentivize" districts to merge, and she's getting air support from a new Michigan State University study claiming that $612 million could be saved by consolidating Michigan's 551 school districts into 83 single-county districts.

Policymakers should approach this study with extreme caution. For one thing, the study appears to contain a significant amount of material plagiarized from other sources. MSU says it's investigating, but from a public policy perspective the more immediate issue is the study's fatally flawed assumptions and methodology.

The original version of the paper, authored by MSU Education Policy Center senior scholar Sharif Shakrani, references just one source: a 2001 study of 12 school district consolidations in rural New York from 1985 to 1997. No explanation is provided for why this one set of data from a narrow corner of another state applies today, but the MSU author uniformly extrapolated the limited New York study results to every school district in Michigan...

[MichCapCon]

MI ping on the school consolidation scam

[crosslink]

I can do my own quick study with out spending a dime. Bigger government will not save money. DAH?

[The Great RJ]

It isn't the number of school districts as much as the administrative and unions that are to blame. If two districts merge in Michigan I bet that the number of administrators will not decline, though teachers will be laid off. The recent fight by a teacher's union in Michigan to keep a Viagra benefit in their health plan at a cost of almost $1 million while several hundred teachers were laid off in the same district shows the union priorities.

Two fixes that states could do: First, establish maximum administrator to student dollar ratios. Second, ban unions in schools or at least make union membership optional and strikes by teachers illegal.

[Grumplestiltskin]

“Consolidating School Districts Won’t Save Michigan $600 Million”

“Consolidating” school districts has _nothing_ to do with saving money.

It’s all about consolidating POWER and CONTROL, and removing them further and further from parents and local influence.

Always was, always will be.

[sharkhawk]

“Consolidating” school districts has _nothing_ to do with saving money.

I don't know if that is true. I grew up in Downers Grove IL (and no I didn't know Emo Phillips went to the other high school) a town of 40,000 people with a high school and elementary school district. Except for one elementary school which had it's own school district with maybe 140 students. That school had its own super making 100,000+ a year, a school board making a nice stipend plus all the other school district leeches. There was no logical reason to have this district except to give the leeches a job.