School Consolidation and Inequality

Abstract

One of the most remarkable yet least remarked upon accomplish ments in American public education in the twentieth century is the success of the school consolidation movement. Between 1930 and 1970, nine out of every ten school districts were eliminated through consolidation. Nearly two-thirds of schools that existed in 1930 were gone by 1970. These and related reforms transformed the small, informal, community-controlled schools of the nineteenth century into centralized, professionally run educational bureaucracies. The American public school system as we know it was born dur ing this brief, dynamic period. While school consolidation represents what may be the most profound reform movement in twentieth-century education, almost nothing is known about its consequences for students. In earlier work on the consolidation movement, Martin West and I found that students educated in systems with larger schools earn significantly lower wages as adults.1 Like many others who have studied the relationship between school attributes and student outcomes, we focused our attention on average out comes. However, there is good reason to suspect that school consolidation influenced the variation in student outcomes as well. In particular, by dramat ically cutting the number of schools and districts, consolidation reduced an important source of between-school and between-district variation in educa tional quality. At the same time, however, consolidation was motivated by a desire to increase instructional specialization, which could be achieved by sub stantially increasing the size of schools and districts. Thus within-school and within-district variation in education quality may have risen as schools and dis tricts became larger and instruction more specialized. This paper investigates