Bill Gates Wants to Break up Your School

The richest man in the world wants teenagers to attend small high-schools. He wants this so much that his multi-billion-dollar foundation is paying school districts to split up existing large high-schools into separate sub-schools, and to create new small schools as well.

Hey, I can sympathize. There is evidence that larger public schools and larger public school districts perform worse and are less efficient than smaller schools and districts (see Market Education).

The problem with Mr. Gates' idea is that it does nothing to change the intrinsic incentive structure of public schooling--and there are powerful incentives for bureaucrats to merge public schools into larger and larger agglomerations. That's how we got all our giant multi-thousand student high-schools in the first place.

A century ago, high schools were small, and folks liked it that way. But bureaucrats gain in prestige and income by increasing the scope of their responsibilities and the size of their budgets. How do you do that in the public school system? You do it by merging small schools and districts together so that you can become the uber-lord of a bigger fiefdom. The amount of consolidation this has caused in U.S. public schools over the years is staggering.

If Gates is incredibly succesful, he might rewind the school consolidation clock by one or two generations in a handful of cities around the country. But there is nothing to prevent these newly created small schools from being re-consolidated as soon as he turns his attention (and money) elsewhere.

Bill, buddy, if you want to make lasting changes to a system, you have to change the structure of the system. You can't just parachute in some localized changes and expect them to somehow endure. Unless you embrace a free market education system with need-based financial assistance, you'll end up just like Ozimandias.