How School District Consolidation Gave Us Fewer and Worse Schools - WSJ

Consolidation empowered teachers unions and decreased social capital. - Howard Husock

Teachers unions emerged as power brokers in the 1960s, as seen in the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike. 

But don’t overlook the role played by a different big-government education “reform” movement: school-district consolidation.
There were more than 117,000 local school districts in the U.S. in the 1939-40 school year. 

• The distance between individual voters and local school boards was small. 
• But between 1930 and 1970, consolidation eliminated 90% of school districts and two-thirds of schools. This transformed “the small, informal, community-controlled schools of the nineteenth century into centralized, professionally run educational bureaucracies,” as education historian Christopher Berry has written...

. Today, there are only 13,318 local school districts in the U.S., including the sprawling citywide districts of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. 

• The dreams of education professionals have proved elusive, if declines in reading and math scores are any indication...