School Quality and Cost:  What Difference Does the District Make?

Gordon Donaldson, University of Maine

February, 2008

Discussion and data about school quality – what our kids are learning – are largely absent from the current debate about how to reorganize Maine’s school districts.   Instead, the debate is mostly about money and whether one district form will be more efficient than another.

What do existing data tell us about the relationship between school quality, cost, and district type?   In particular, what about the claim underlying the Governor’s plan that multi-town districts with a single centralized School Board and superintendent will bring “value-added” education and savings to Maine’s children, families, and communities?

Cost: No Clear Advantage to School Unions or SADs

My comparison of School Unions in Hancock and Washington Counties and similarly-sized, rural SADs demonstrated mixed results on the cost question.  Some Unions offered a lower overall cost-per-pupil than did some SADs.  In some expenditure categories, one type of district out-performed the other; in others, the pattern was reversed. 

David Silvernail, whose office performs much of the analysis for the MDOE and legislature, reports the same mixed results.  He stated in January to the Education Committee that cost-effectiveness comparisons of School Unions and SADs were inconclusive.

It appears, then, that factors other than the type of district are making the biggest differences in expenditure levels.  Simply changing the district structure, that is, may change some administrative costs, but it’s very unlikely to effect major changes in overall expenditures. 

Quality: Municipalities May Have Advantages over Multi-Town Districts

I compared higher and lower performing schools identified by David Silvernail (May, 2007) in four district types to see if some district types had disproportionate numbers of either high or low-performing schools.  I asked, for example, “If 11% of the K-8 elementary schools in Maine are in School Unions, is the percentage of high performing K-8 schools above or below that expected percentage?”  If we found a higher-than-expected proportion of high-performing schools in one type of district than in another – or a higher proportion of lower performing schools in one type – we might reasonably think that district type has an effect on the quality of schools (indeed, this is a premise of the reorganization law).  

I found that:

v Municipal school systems tended to have more high-performing schools and fewer low-performing schools than expected.

v School Unions had approximately their expected proportion of high and low performing schools, with slightly fewer high-performing K-8 schools and considerably fewer low-performing K-8 schools than we would expect.

v SADs had approximately their expected proportion of high performing schools but a consistently higher proportion of low-performing elementary and middle schools than we would expect. 

v CSDs had a higher proportion of low-performing high schools than we would expect. 

Although we must, as Silvernail warns, be cautious with the data in his study, this analysis yield no strong pattern of “value-added” with one form of school district over another.  If anything, it suggests that municipal school boards and administrative structures favor more consistently high school performance and that centralized governance/administration over multi-town regions is a less effective structure for addressing low-performing schools.