Should Some School Districts Be Broken Up?

New York City's school system is not really an example of anything except itself, despite the many times it's written about and pointed at. This should not be a surprise. We are lousy at history in this country, and so we miss obvious things, like the change in scale. Thomas Jefferson was the President of a country with roughly six million people in it; New York City contains a bit over eight million. 

Our biggest school districts are huge. NYC schools contain almost a million students; the tenth largest school district (Palm Springs) just under 200K. 

So when Howard Husock writing for the reliably right-tilted Fordham Institute thinky tank says that large urban districts should be broken up, he's raising a topic worth talking about. 

Unfortunately, he mostly likes the idea of breaking up large districts because it would break up large unions, which is certainly in keeping with the current narrative that the Biden administration was Very Naughty for talking to teachers unions about re-opening schools. Why is it that when business folks form community groups in order to insert themselves into education policy, that's commendable and swell, but when unions that represent the people who actually work on the ground in education try to speak up, that's considered bad and selfish?

But it's still worth talking about.

The bigger the district, the harder to represent the interests and needs of communities within the larger whole. It's harder for voters to have a voice in the district, harder for teachers to have a voice in the union (I long ago gave up trying to keep track of all the sub-groups in the NYC teachers union). And contrary to anti-union sentiment, a union can be a big aid in helping a district run smoothly--if they know their people.

A small district provides huge benefits. I live and worked in a district of 14K or so citizens, teaching in a school of roughly700-900 students (things changed over the thirty-some years). There was never a year in which I did not know some of my parents outside of school. You want to talk about accountability? In small town teaching, you meet the people whose tax dollars pay you and whose children you teach every day, everywhere. In the grocery store. In church. At the hair dresser. When you walk down the street. In the bar--so watch yourself. All of that goes double for administrators and school board members. If you have been in the district for more than five years, people in the community know about how you do your job, what you teach. There may even be a unit or content that you are "famous" for. 

Not everybody can take it, and some never move into the district where they teach. People think less of them for it. "I don't even know what s/he looks like," is one of the biggest insults that can be leveled at an administrator.

Nor is that the end of it, because a large percentage of your students stay right here, and if you are an awful human being to them in the classroom, you will pay for it forever. My car is fixed, my food is made and served, my innards probed, my streets patrolled, most things I buy sold to me, the volunteer groups I serve in populated, and my own children taught by people that I taught in school. 

Another story. When I was a local union president and contract negotiations turned first contentious and then into a strike, the board president and I met once a week for breakfast. We did no negotiation or discussion of issues; mostly we were doing it to remember that the Other Side was human. 

And we haven't even gotten to all the accountability effects that come because I'm also a parent whose children went through the system. And the ability of teachers to coordinate because they have regular contact with each other. And the strong sense of community. And the positive effects on communication. Let's just summarize by saying that there are many good effects from a small district.

There's a lower limit to size effectiveness, the part where you can't offer certain courses because only two students sign up (and one is going to drop out once she sees what it is really like). or when you can't offer sports or band or other extracurriculars because too few students.

But there is a huge problem with breaking up large districts. We've seen districts do it, and it almost always turns out to be a sneaky form of segregation. School district secession all too often is about "We'd like to take our children into a district away from Those People's Children." An awful lot of de facto segregation has been accomplished by drawing district lines. At the same time, New York City schools, divided into a giant maze of sub-districts, are the most segregated in the nation.

There's also the problem of breaking a large district into smaller districts separated by wealth (or the lack thereof). Once again, Chester Upland School District of Pennsylvania provides an example--Delaware County contains some of the richest and poorest districts in the entire state, carefully separated by well-drawn boundaries. The prospect of using the same kind of computerized tools that have facilitated political gerrymandering--that's not a good prospect.

Any attempt to break up a large district would require some serious oversight to avoid the risk of simply replicating the same inequities already present elsewhere. (And choice policies also replicate those problems, while stripping parents of rights and communities of representation.) An answer probably looks more like a community school, but that's a conversation for another day. For today, breaking up school districts might well be worth it, if done carefully and with a care for all students involved, and not just because you're excited about sticking it to teachers unions.