IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/har/wpaper/0703.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Growing Pains: The School Consolidation Movement and Student Outcomes

Author

Listed:
  • Christopher R. Berry
  • Martin West

Abstract

Between 1930 and 1970, average school size in the United States increased from 87 to 440 and average district size increased from 170 to 2,300 students, as over 120,000 schools and 100,000 districts were eliminated via consolidation. We exploit variation in the timing of consolidation across states to estimate the effects of changing school and district size on student outcomes using data from the Public-Use Micro-Sample of the 1980 U.S. census. Students educated in states with smaller schools obtained higher returns to education and completed more years of schooling. While larger districts were associated with modestly higher returns to education and increased educational attainment in most specifications, any gains from the consolidation of districts were far outweighed by the harmful effects of larger schools. Reduced form estimates of the effects of consolidation on labor-market outcomes confirm that students from states with larger schools earned significantly lower wages later in life.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher R. Berry & Martin West, 2007. "Growing Pains: The School Consolidation Movement and Student Outcomes," Working Papers 0703, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago.
    • Handle: RePEc:har:wpaper:0703
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://harrisschool.uchicago.edu/about/publications/working-papers/pdf/wp_07_03.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:har:wpaper:0703. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Eleanor Cartelli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/spuchus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.