Administrative Costs per Pupil Compared to District Size in Utah 2013-2014

These most recent statistics compiled from the Utah Taxpayers Association "School Spending Report: Fiscal Year 2013-2014," April 2015 verifies the conclusions of my previous study comparing administrative costs per student to size of district (with the possible change of the number from 1000 to 2000 in student population). This graph shows that while the smallest districts (under 2000) do have higher administrative costs, as stated on the original study: "Administrative costs bear little, if any, correlation to size of districts over 1,000 students".

Administrative costs, rather than a function of size, are a reflection of decisions made by local boards of education or administrators. Usually the more money they accept from federal government programs, the more they spend in administrative costs per pupil due to government requirements.

The main point is: the assumption that bigger is less expensive with administrative costs is simply not true unless comparing to a district that is very small (like below 2000 students). It is certainly not a reason to avoid dividing a big district into a few community-sized districts. Dividing would not, by itself, cause administrative costs to rise. If they rose it would be for other reasons, such as a community's desires for another program, etc.

To be more specific, Cache School District has the lowest costs and is about the size that a Lehi School District would be. Alpine (72,419) is 2nd, but Tooele (14,107), South Sanpete (3462), Logan (5987), and Iron (8685) all have less administrative costs per pupil than Jordan or Davis SD. Box Elder (11,131) and tiny Juab (2287) are lower than Granite, Salt Lake, and Nebo.

District	Student Population	Admin $/student
Cache	16038	$ 491.00
Alpine	72419	$ 521.00
Tooele	14107	$ 540.00
So. Sanpete	3462	$ 555.00
Logan	5987	$ 556.00
Iron	8685	$ 578.00
Jordan	52855	$ 594.00
Davis	68573	$ 595.00
Box Elder	11131	$ 596.00
Washington	27099	$ 614.00
Juab	2287	$ 619.00
Granite	68106	$ 623.00
Salt Lake	23965	$ 637.00
Morgan	2632	$ 652.00
Nebo	31230	$ 658.00
Weber	31028	$ 658.00
Sevier	4585	$ 676.00
Uintah	7591	$ 697.00
Murray	6435	$ 745.00
Duchesne	5021	$ 747.00
Wasatch	5786	$ 757.00
Ogden	12489	$ 759.00
Millard	2841	$ 799.00
Provo	14799	$ 813.00
Canyons	33674	$ 901.00
No. Summit	990	$ 972.00
So. Summit	1495	$ 979.00
Carbon	3369	$ 1,102.00
San Juan	3020	$ 1,106.00
Grand	1455	$ 1,128.00
Beaver	1579	$ 1,159.00
Park City	4630	$ 1,315.00
Kane	1212	$ 1,360.00
Emery	2310	$ 1,370.00
Wayne	501	$ 1,512.00
Garfield	930	$ 1,554.00
Tintic	250	$ 2,026.00
Rich	479	$ 2,325.00
Piute	304	$ 2,380.00
Daggett	194	$ 2,825.00

The Answer is Reduce School District Size

Mike Antonucci, director of the Education Intelligence Agency (EIA), gives more information about how reducing school district size can solve many of the problems in education. His first bullet point is as follows:

One of the bits of information the EIA tables provide is whether a school district spent 65 percent or more on "instruction."

EIA ranked all 14,218 school districts by enrollment and checked the correlation between size and the ability to reach the 65 percent instructional threshold. The results should surprise economists, but not observers of public education.

In 2003-04, the U.S. had 26 school districts with more than 100,000 students. Of these, only New York City and Cobb County, Georgia, met the 65% threshold. That's a success rate of 7.7 percent.

An additional 61 school districts had between 50,000 and 100,000 students. Of these, five (8.2 percent) met the mark.

Let's continue down the rankings. There were 170 school districts with 25,000 to 50,000 students. Of these, 25 spent 65% on instruction (14.7 percent).

Then we reach a plateau. There were 7,152 districts with an enrollment between 1,000 and 25,000 students. Of these, 1,213 (17.0 percent) reached 65% on instructional spending. No matter how you subdivide this group, there is little deviation in how many districts meet the mark. But below 1,000 enrollment, the pattern resumed.

There were 2,382 districts with between 500 and 1,000 students. Of these, 476 (20.0 percent) reached the 65% mark. And of the 4,427 districts with fewer than 500 students, 976 (22.0 percent) met the 65% mark.

There are variety of theories to explain why this should be so, but the data demolish any notion that increasing the size of a school district will increase the resources available to spend "in the classroom." On the contrary: the larger the district, the greater the chance that more money will be spent on "non-instructional" programs and personnel.

Read more from the original article: http://www.eiaonline.com/archives/20060501.htm

Larger School Districts Tend to Veer 'Off Task'

Vin Suprynowicz, assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, recently posted about the problems that large school districts are prone to have.

Read more from the original article here: http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/suprynowicz030316.html

"While espousing the virtues of small schools with a community atmosphere, our public school system has monstrously large school districts, mainly in poor urban areas, which are home to the worst problems in education."

And of course, caught up as they are in the supposed "efficiencies of scale," the largest districts tend to house the largest schools -- Los Angeles Unified, alone, accounting for five of America's 15 largest campuses.  

...

The Los Angeles district actually managed to lose track of $228 million last year -- a mere 5 percent of its budget. "The (district) does not know how many employees it has working in what position at any given time, or how much they get paid," reported L&L Fuller Inc. in an official 1999 audit.  

...

A number of researchers over the past 10 years have found that large districts are increasingly "off task," in the language of education. A 1989 study from the magazine Education and Urban Society found, "As specialization in staff grows, program offerings expand, and administrative personnel increase, problems of coordination and control also increase. And in large systems, time and energy are more likely to be shifted away from core service activities."   

So why is there so much resistance to dividing large school districts?

School teachers' and administrators' unions "don't control the size of school districts directly, but they do resist efforts to break up large ones. ... Why? Because it's a lot easier for union officials to organize, administer and oversee one local union of eight thousands teachers than to have 80 local unions with 100 teachers each."

Larger districts are handier for administrators, too, Mr. Brimelow points out. "The larger the district, the larger the bureaucracy and the higher the career ladder. The American government school system suffers from penalties of scale. Through the principle of bureaucratic bloat known as Parkinson's Law, the larger a school district gets, the more resources tend to get diverted to secondary or even nonessential activities."