Are Interdistrict Transfers The Answer?
There’s been a spate of interest recently among progressives in doing more to promote the availability of “interdistrict transfers” that would let students shift out of their current public school and into a different school in a different district. The idea would be to do something to undue the unfair consequences of our current arbitrary system of district boundaries. Education Sector decided to take a look at the potential for this idea and has now released a report on the subject that’s fairly skeptical. As Erin Dillon explains, “To our surprise, we found that interdistrict choice on a large scale is unlikely to benefit a large percent of students - only 10 to 20 percent are likely to find a better school option.”
Dianne Piche, executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, makes a number of points in response to argue that this is likely an underestimate. I would also only observe that “only” is doing a lot of work in the phrase “only 10 to 20 percent are likely to find a better school option.” A different phrase would be “as many as 10 to 20 percent would likely find a better school option.” If I were a member of one of the 10-20 percent of families who could be helped by these measures, I’m not sure I would find their inefficacy for the other 80 percent of the population to be a very compelling reason to poo-poo the possibilities here. The public school system, by its nature, is very fragmented so lots of positive steps don’t help most kids and so you just kind of need to spoon more and more stuff on the plate.
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27 Responses to “Are Interdistrict Transfers The Answer?”
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August 26th, 2008 at 11:00 am
So… we’re back to busing?
August 26th, 2008 at 11:04 am
But if the resources allotted to that 10-20% leave the district as well then the other 80% get a district with 10-20% less funds.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:10 am
“The idea would be to do something to undue the unfair consequences”
you never disappoint, my.
this time you actually exceeded expectations.
(you may think that’s undo praise, but it isn’t; i’m only dueing it to give you your do.)
August 26th, 2008 at 11:15 am
I did some research on a pilot school choice program on a commission from the NJ state legislature, which was deciding whether to renew the program on a permanent basis. Basically, everyone supported it because there was per-pupil state funding that followed the students to “choice districts” (one SD per county, though not every county has one). Theoretically, state funding to the sending district then declined on a three-year schedule. However, for other reasons state funding was frozen between something like 2003 and 2005, so the withdrawal of per-pupil funding never happened, hence everyone loved the program.
It was good for the well-chosen choice districts, which tended to be districts with declining “home” enrollment where the cash inflow from incoming choice pupils improved performance for everyone. There was no way to ascertain whether the program withdrew quality kids from classrooms that hence became worse off because there wasn’t a high enough concentration of kids in any one sending district to measure anything.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:22 am
It’s no different from charter schools–just benefits the few while relieving political and moral pressure to fix the problems that impact the many. The problem, after all, with charter schools isn’t that they’re (de facto) private, it’s that they are the antithesis of systemic reform. The only good thing I can think of about interdistrict transfers is that the threat of doing them on a wider basis might be useful pressure towards genuine reform.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:23 am
What is the percentage of children that actually need to find a better school option and would take advantage of it? Surely it can’t be much more than 20%.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Matt,
I agree completely that “only” helping 10% to 20% of kids is still pretty good. (I have no idea how accurate that number is.) But if vouchers helped the same share of kids, would you support those?
And it could be that the kids who remain in their old districts benefit over the long run, as their districts shape up in an effort to win back students. (Of course, they could also suffer from fewer resources, but that’s an empirical question.)
August 26th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Do economists have a term to describe the competition effect Dave (#7) is talking about? Something where a subset of consumers researchs purchases well enough to convince producers to make high quality products. The idea is that even the uneducated consumers can be protected if there are enough “tech geeks” to keep manufacturers honest.
Maybe inter-district transfers could achieve this beneficial effect of vouchers without the regressive transfer of wealth to rich people who already have their kids in private school.
Business/economics people help me out on the name of that concept.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Milwaukee does this (”Chapter 220″ program) with the ‘burbs. I don’t know how successful it was in general, but I can offer a few personal observations.
- I was a 220 kid from the burbs into MPS 3-5th grade, attending a magnet school, which was approx 50/50 white/black. Everyone got along but I was tightest with (1) the white kids on my bus from the burbs and (2) the other big nerds in my grade, which also happened to be white, but from the city.
- Given the option to go to the magnet middle school, I declined, as I was getting sick of the 45-60 minute bus ride.
- Back in the sticks we had outbound 220 students. Again, I think everyone got along OK, but there was minimal mixing aside from the self-selecting activities like choir and athletics. Still, in the absence of 220 it’s conceivable that some students could have gone all through HS without having a black classmate.
- Cheer squads were divided into the black Dance Team and the white Cheerleaders. This was a division I neither understood nor cared about.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Hey great idea!
[waits 30 seconds]
Wait a second!! You want to bus low-income black kids into my school district!
No way!!!!
August 26th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
In Cincinnati, Ohio we have magnet schools that can be applied to. Most are specialty schools like German, Spanish, Science etc. but we also have some standard college prep type magnets. One is in a fairly affluent neighborhood. Kids are bussed in from a less affluent neighborhood. The school also allows in kids from anywhere in the city as long as they have transportation. The schools have waiting lists and compete with local private schools. Because parents need to apply the result is that the parents are more engaged in their kids education so, on the whole, the students are motivated and cause few discipline problems.
It isn’t the solution to all problems but it’s a piece of a solution.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
I work for an agency that coordinates this process for schools in one of the northeastern states. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s better than any of the other options currently available to kids in the urban districts — and while I’m very far from being a free-marketer on education issues, and there may be other pressures at play, it seems to be one of the factors driving the urban districts to improve/offer better options for those students who remain (who are, of course, the vast majority).
August 26th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I agree completely that “only” helping 10% to 20% of kids is still pretty good. (I have no idea how accurate that number is.) But if vouchers helped the same share of kids, would you support those?
How is this any different from a voucher system? As far as I can tell, this is simply a public school only voucher system.
But if the resources allotted to that 10-20% leave the district as well then the other 80% get a district with 10-20% less funds.
Why is this a problem? It seems to me a school that loses ten percent of its cash is hardly in a position to complain if it’s got ten percent fewer students. Yes, I realize fewer teachers might be needed, and that might mean staff reductions. The horror! FWIW, here in Massachusetts an interdistrict transfer plan was tried out fifteen years ago or so. My recollection is that it wasn’t a rousing success. But the problem with the Massachusetts plan was that only the (typically rather small) state-government portion of per pupil education expenditure traveled with the student. For interdistrict transfer plans to work, the whole enchilada has to be portable.
The problem, after all, with charter schools isn’t that they’re (de facto) private, it’s that they are the antithesis of systemic reform.
Really? I thought the problem most liberals had with market-based reforms of public education was indeed the leakage of private money into institutions not owned and operated by the state. Anyway, it seems to me interdistrict transfer-style school choice is a fairly radical “systemic reform.” In fact, it’s just one small step away from something I’ve long advocated — abolishing school district boundaries altogether. Like most people concerned with the issue, I’ve heard numerous creative ideas floated to improve public education. Many of them I suspect would yield meaningful results. The problem, it seems to me, is that there’s no machinery — no leverage — capable of implementing these ideas on a wide-scale basis. The threat of losing a big chunk of your customers to that innovative school down the road strikes me as the only realistic means of forcing educators to, you know, actually implement the many great ideas for reform that are on offer.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Here in Colorado, we have open enrollment: Any kid can go to any public school in the state, as long as that school still has room after the in-district kids have enrolled. Our local elementary school, in the suburbs of Denver, is one of the top-rated schools in the state (it’s the primary reason we moved here), and naturally it gets a lot of open-enrolled kids.
The interesting thing is that there are only a couple of kids coming from Denver or the poorer suburbs. The vast majority come from the farther-flung, McMansion-filled exurbs, which are heavily Republican and do everything they can to keep their taxes low. The school systems there are considered very weak. They’ve gone to year-round schooling to save money, which of course parents and students hate, and the educational levels are subpar for the area. But now they have options.
So that’s who these transfers will primarily benefit: people who don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes, but want to leech off the government programs the rest of us are paying for.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Point taken regarding the 10-20%, but what about the remaining 80-90%? I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I think that has to be addressed. Certainly, if you can help 10-20% of students at no cost to the remaining 80-90%, I don’t see why you shouldn’t (I believe that’s called Pareto efficiency or something, but economics is not my forte). But it seems likely that there will be some sort of cost for the remaining kids, and then, as always, the question is whether the benefit outweighs the cost.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
That ‘only’ isn’t just a little bad. I doubt you could find any policy proposals in the last 20 years that were likely to materially improve even so much as 10-20% of students at a time.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Tom,
do you have a references or cite for your statement. I looked up per capita property taxes in Colorado and it is the gateway countires that are the poorest and some of the exurb counties of Denver are the richest.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
I don’t have a hard cite; I got the information on property taxes from my wife, who works in public finance here in Colorado.
I’m specifically talking about kids in Douglas County (their entire school system has shifted to year-round) transferring into Cherry Creek schools, if that helps any.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Re: Jasper (#13): How is this any different from a voucher system? As far as I can tell, this is simply a public school only voucher system.
I’ll refer you back to Steve (#8): Maybe inter-district transfers could achieve this beneficial effect of vouchers without the regressive transfer of wealth to rich people who already have their kids in private school.
On the other hand, regressive wealth transfer has been Federal policy for the last 7 years, so maybe that’s a voucher feature, not a bug.
August 26th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Tom, when I looked at
http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdefinance/FY06-07RevExp.htm
Cherry creek gets $4,243 property tax dollar per student whereas Douglas count gets $3,921 per student. I would guess that Douglas is being overwhelmed by either new construction or immigrants whereas Cheery Creek has an older community. I could not find that data to support blaming this on Republicans.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
I was able to transfer my son from the school district we lived in to a different one only because he was in the majority race in the school district he came from and the minority in the school district he transferred into. More simply put, white kids in majority white suburban school districts could transfer into magnet schools in the majority black Houston school district. Black kids could not transfer, although black kids in the Houston school district could transfer to a majority white suburban school district. The catch was, transportation was the student’s responsibility. For us, it was a good deal, but not many people would be able to manage the transportation.
August 26th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
In Michigan we’ve had limited school choice for a while now. It’s limited to the extent that districts can choose whether or not to receive outside students, but once it decides to it has to take all comers. I’m pretty sure the top districts such as Bloomfield Hills and Northville haven’t taken part, but some pretty good ones in cities with declining populations (smaller family sizes, you know) such as Royal Oak have.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any evaluations of this program. I’d like to see a non-ideologically driven evaluation (i.e., not the Mackinac Center and not the Detroit Federation of Teachers), because one would hope it would be one way out for kids who otherwise would be trapped in the Detroit Public Schools.
August 26th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Why is this a problem? It seems to me a school that loses ten percent of its cash is hardly in a position to complain if it’s got ten percent fewer students. Yes, I realize fewer teachers might be needed, and that might mean staff reductions. The horror!
You are unfamiliar with the concept of fixed costs?
If you go from 1000 students to 900 students you still have to pay the same amount for heating the building, electricity, etc. So if the funding is also cut by 10% you would end up with less per student for things that are not fixed costs
Really? I thought the problem most liberals had with market-based reforms of public education was indeed the leakage of private money into institutions not owned and operated by the state
No, the problem I have with “market-based reforms” is that they don’t work.
For thousands of years the free and fair market worked its magic and life was nasty, brutish, and short, just as nature intended. Then those damn bureaucrats in “Warshington” gave us big gob’m’nt one-size-fits-all wasteful “entitlements” and stifled innovation with crippling regulations and we end up with prosperity that our ancestors never dreamed of.
Conservatives may disagree with this admittedly oversimplified view, but Conservatives are not Liberals. Please don’t assume that we secretly agree that if we just eliminated the DOE then the market fairy would turn every child into Einstein but we can’t say that because we want 5 buck a month in union dues from Mr. Chips
How is this any different from a voucher system?
I have no problem contributing to a pot o’ money to pay for educating children in general even though I don’t have school age children. This is the same logic that I contribute to a pot o’ money that buys new fire trucks even though my house isn’t on fire
I don’t mind that all things being otherwise equal people with young kids put less into this pot then I do. They have less ability to pay after all
But I have a huge problem with me and my neighbors being forced to hand over a check to Joe and Jane for them to spend as they see fit just because they want to send their precious bundle of joy to a school the my neighbors cant afford
Inter-District transfers aren’t the same thing at all
I’m still just contributing to a pot o’ money for generic use. The problem that it is meant to solve is that there are a lot of widely varying size pots for education around and if you move students to an area with a bigger pot you get a slight improvement
I’d rather just move the money around, seems a lot more efficient. But every time this is suggested out come the pitchforks
August 27th, 2008 at 3:54 am
I’m not a parent and am private school educated, so I have just about no familiarity with the public school system.
Are parents told which school to send their children to? Since schools are a state government program, why can’t a taxpayer just send their kids to any school in the state, as long as they were willing to pay the transportation costs?
If someone told me to design a government run elementary school program from scratch, I would have states just open a bunch of schools scattered around the state, funded by general state taxes, and any taxpayer could send their kids to any school. Transportation wouldn’t be provided, so usually they would just pick the nearest school. Maybe even higher one or more contractors to run the schools instead of running them directly.
I know with churches you are not restricted to your parish church, and sometimes people will drive across town to go to a church instead of the one near their home because they prefer the one across town for various reasons. And periodically bishops or whoever makes these decisions in protestant churches will review the churches and close down parishes that aren’t getting enough parishoners.
Likewise, we don’t fund police stations only from taxes levied in the police precinct, they are funded on a city wide basis, otherwise crime in low income areas would be even worse than it is now. Same with fire stations and hospitals.
So what am I missing?
August 27th, 2008 at 6:46 am
Schools are generally funded in large part by local property taxes. Each school board gets a good chunk of change from local taxpayers. In most places, if you are coming out of this area there are hoops to jump through. Otherwise, people who live in area X might decide to simply not have schools and have their children go register in area Y. If all of the funding came from a central sources, it wouldn’t be as big of a deal, but so long as a substantial amount comes from local sources and differing systems raise and spend different amounts of money, inter-district transfers are problematic.
Even within the area served by a single board of education, transfers are problematic. Schools have a capacity, some sort of maximum number of students who can enroll there. Expanding that capacity typically means millions of dollars of up-front construction costs, and even then its hard to expand things like cafeterias, school hallways, etc. So if you have school X that is doing poorly and school Y that is doing well, you can’t simply close down school X and send everyone over to school Y. At a certain point, school Y can’t take any more students.
So how would those students be chosen? Lottery? The students with the best grades? The students who could provide their own transportation? What does the system do to improve the educational prospects for students who cannot go to another school?
So that’s the problem with looking to transfers as a way of fixing “failing” schools.
One solution that no one ever talks about is fixing incompetent management from Principals and local school boards. All of the focus seems to be on labeling some schools as “failing” and demonizing teachers unions. If only the unions would allow the principals and bureaucrats make things better . . . am I the only one who thinks that maybe, just maybe, classroom teachers might actually *not* be the main problem? Isn’t it possible that its a failure of leadership? If you have a school with a lousy principal, and “reform” gives that principal more power of the teachers, that’s not going to make anything better, it would likely make things worse. Just saying.
August 27th, 2008 at 11:33 am
On the other hand, regressive wealth transfer has been Federal policy for the last 7 years, so maybe that’s a voucher feature, not a bug.
heh
August 27th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Jeff452: They certainly work — or at least they can work — when it comes to education. The Swedes have had excellent results opening up their education sector to market forces. Indeed the one area of American education where competition and market forces are the rule and not the exception — the post-secondary tier — is the one area of American education widely considered the world leader. Funny, that.
Ed: Me, too. Or imagine if what you describe above were the rule, and a proposal was floated to change the system to one whereby kids were required to attend schools assigned to them by bureaucrats, based mostly on geography, and the only way to jump the border into another school was to sell your house and move. Think the public would embrace such a proposal? Not a chance.