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How Cost-Effective Is Your School District?
This piece appeared in the Republican-American (Waterbury, Connecticut) on April 13, 2005.
If you think the legislature's fight over the 2005-2006 budget is getting nasty, just wait. The 169 municipalities that comprise Connecticut's local level of government are also finalizing their budgets for the next fiscal year, and that means dozens of contentious, even bitter battles will soon be waged across the state.
And as usual, the fights will be mostly about education. Statewide, about six out of every ten dollars towns spend are devoted to school expenses -- and in some of the smallest towns, that share is much higher.
In order to bring some badly needed cost-benefit analysis to the ongoing debate over what taxpayers pay -- and what they get -- for their education dollar, the Yankee Institute recently examined the relationship between per-pupil costs and student performance on the 2003 Connecticut Mastery Test.
For each school district, the percentages of students meeting the state's goal on the CMT's three subjects (math, reading, and writing) were averaged, and the resulting figure was divided into districts' per-pupil expenses. The amounts produced for each district (i.e., their cost-benefit values) ranged from $71.42 (the best score) to $402.47 (the worst).
That's a pretty wide value gap. The per-pupil cost of a percentage point of goal attainment in Connecticut's big cities was well over five times higher than the revenue spent by the most efficient districts.
The finding that Connecticut's urban schools spend enormous sums of money and generate pathetic results isn't news. But the value gap manifests itself in many other ways, too.
The Waterbury area provided ample evidence of the widely divergent cost-effectiveness of the state's government schools. For example, on a per-pupil basis, Naugatuck's school district spent $133.02 for every point of CMT proficiency in the fourth grade. That's worse than the state average, for a rank of 97 out of 158. But right next door, the Region 16 district spent only $97.17, for a rank of 31.
Watertown and Plymouth are another intriguing matchup. Household incomes in these nearby towns are very similar. But out of 147 districts studied at the eighth-grade level, Plymouth ranked a dismal 117th. Right next door, Watertown ranked a much better 45th.
Down in Fairfield County, the state's most affluent towns also experienced substantial value gaps. Wealth may run deep in towns like Greenwich, Redding, and Westport, but government-school efficiency doesn't. Similarly affluent towns, such as Ridgefield and New Fairfield, returned far higher yields for their taxpayers -- savings that in some cases topped 40 percent.
What explains the value gap in Connecticut's government schools?
The most decisive factor is something entirely beyond a school district's control: students' home environments.
Four decades ago, the Coleman Commission confirmed that resources devoted to schools "show virtually no relation to achievement" when students' home lives were weighed. In the early 1990s, researchers at the Educational Testing Service concluded that 91 percent of the difference among the performance of the states' government schools could be explained by five factors, including the hours students spent watching television, amount of reading material available in their homes, and number of pages they read for homework every night.
Of course, several components of government-school efficiency can be controlled by taxpayers and elected officials. Reducing bureaucracy, standing up to outrageous teacher-union demands, and abandoning ineffective class-size-reduction schemes are all policies inefficient districts should pursue -- or be forced to pursue.
Organizing a taxpayer group to impose fiscal discipline through the ballot box is another worthwhile endeavor. For their part, government-school backers can do what citizens in over 50 Connecticut towns have already done: start a private foundation to offset district costs.
"You would risk a hernia," economist Thomas Sowell warned, "if you tried to carry all the studies which show that more money has virtually no effect on the quality of American education."
With youths spending 90 percent of their lives outside the classroom, it is time for Connecticut to seriously reexamine its longstanding belief that merely raising school districts' budgets will help students learn better. To the extent that educational services can be delivered in a more efficient manner, the districts with impressive cost-benefit values should be studied, and emulated. But the role played by the family, which the Educational Testing Service calls "America's smallest school," must also be examined.
Few would argue with the noble goal of providing every Connecticut child an adequate (indeed, a superior) education. But it's now clear that the method so often promulgated to improve student performance in Connecticut -- devoting ever-greater amounts of tax revenue to the state's government schools -- is hollow.
D. Dowd Muska is the Yankee Institute's Philip Gressel Fellow for Tax and Budget Policy.
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The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Inc. is a nonpartisan educational and research organization founded more than two decades ago. Today, the Yankee Institute's mission is to "promote economic opportunity through lower taxes and new ideas for better government in Connecticut." The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Inc. is classified by the IRS as a 501 (c) (3) public charity. Contributions are deductible to the extent allowed by law.
