Playing Monopoly with Detroit's Kids

[Here's my latest op/ed for the Mackinac Center. They seem to like it over at the National Review.]

Last November, the Detroit Public School District estimated it would suffer a $55 million budget shortfall for the 2003/2004 school year. They bumped the figure up to $78 million in March, and then it hit a whopping $250 million last month.

To balance this suddenly ballooning deficit, as required by law, 3,200 district employees will be laid off this summer.

How did it come to this?

Most of the media have tried to answer that question by looking through a microscope, identifying specific mistakes made by the current crop of public school administrators. They point out that district officials grossly overestimated enrollment, and that fewer kids have meant less revenue. They report that some school principals failed to cut positions in their schools, as they had been told to do, causing higher-than expected personnel expenses.

But let’s put away the microscope for a minute and grab a wide angle lens.

Back in 1996/97, Detroit Public Schools enrolled 183,447 students, and employed 22,077 staff. Enrollment has fallen every year since, averaging 147,808 during the 2003/04 school year. Employment in the District has not fallen. It has risen to 23,800. So the Detroit Public School system is now employing 1,723 more people to teach an estimated 35,000 fewer children.

That can get kind of expensive.

After adjusting for inflation, the District’s total spending is only fractionally higher today than it was back in 1996/97 ($1.63 billion now versus $1.62 billion then, in 2004 dollars), but this represents a startling increase per pupil. The District spent $8,830 on each student in 1996/97, but more than $11,000 in 2003/2004....

[Read the conclusion of this commentary on the Mackinac Center website]