Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts

by William A. Fischel

A significant factor for many people deciding where to live is the quality of the local school district, with superior schools creating a price premium for housing. The result is a “race to the top,” as all school districts attempt to improve their performance in order to attract homebuyers. Given the importance of school districts to the daily lives of children and families, it is surprising that their evolution has not received much attention.

 

In this provocative book, William Fischel argues that the historical development of school districts reflects Americans’ desire to make their communities attractive to outsiders. The result has been a standardized, interchangeable system of education not overly demanding for either students or teachers, one that involved parents and local voters in its governance and finance. Innovative in its focus on bottom-up processes generated by individual behaviors rather than top-down decisions by bureaucrats, Making the Grade provides a new perspective on education reform that emphasizes how public schools form the basis for the localized social capital in American towns and cities.

Genres: Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 5 out of 5]

As usual, Fischel examines previously neglected areas of American political history and comes back with surprising and relevant insights. In this book his subject is the shape and form of American school districts.

He shows that the one room school district was both an efficient use of rural resources and a means by which Congress encouraged settlement on the Western plains and assured that states would not lock up public lands. He shows that the rise of graded schools and consolidated school districts in the early 20th century was almost totally independent of the calls of educational "experts" like Horace Mann; it was an emergent phenomena arising from the bottom-up as people became wealthier and more urban. He shows that the large, county-based school districts of the South arose in the early 20th century because separate schools for both black and whites made larger catchment areas a necessity for large elementary and high schools (ironically, these county-districts made desegregation easier after Swann v. Mecklenberg in 1971). Most intriguingly, Fischel posits that despite all the failures of American public schools, voucher programs' noticeable lack of success at the polls (11 defeats since 1990) demonstrate that people value schools not just for the education they provide, but for the community "social capital" they create by bringing parents from the same small area together. From a semi-libertarian economist who consistently advocates privatization and decentralized local government services, this is an interesting case, and I hope he follows up on it.

Although more repetitive then some of his other books, this is a great work of political and economic history.