Have been picked by the industry to be here and share information. You are all very intelligent people. We would invite you to send us any information you have when it comes to how we do this better and best and make america safe. Please read the bios. They are all impressive people. I want to thank them for being here. Lets take a 15minute break. Hank you [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2013] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] lookmorrow we will take a at the july unemployment numbers and the role of low wage and parttime positions. Then threats from al qaeda with a former u. S. Ambassador to iraq. Hen u. S. Russia relations all of that starting at 7 00 a. M. Eastern time on cspan. The relationship between the u. S. And russia is one of our topics tomorrow on newsmakers. He is the chair of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on europe, eurasia, and emerging threat. Here is some of what he had to say. It is imperative we have a Good Relationship with russia. Yet we have this administration and many republicans pushing russia away, still thinking about russia as it was during the cold war. For the causeood of peace and it is no good for us. Is it possible you are being naive . Officials have said Edward Snowden is the most damaging leaker in American History. I think caring what mr. Snowden did by alerting the American People to over surveillance on the part of our own government of our population, to call him a traitor is going too far. In fact, he was being loyal to the rest of us by letting the American People know their government was getting out of hand. When our government suggests it has to keep a record of every phone call every citizen makes in order to protect us, it has gone too far. ,he fact russia gave him asylum i think it is very symbolic. Russia, a country and we attacked i was Ronald Reagans speech writer for seven years. Oforked with him on most his hard core speeches concerning the soviet union. I worked with the mujahideen in afghanistan fighting the soviet union. During those days, we were against the soviet union because it had too much control and surveillance over its own people. Now many of the same things were claiming the soviet union was evil about we can see happening in our own society. Snowden was just alerting us to our government getting out of hand. Russia accepting him. Expecting him for hostile andot as act as it is being portrayed. You can watch the interview in its entirety tomorrow on c span. All of the handsome young officers were surrounding my grandmother at the time. My grandfather had been trying to talk to her but could not because of all the handsome young men. They all rushed to go upstairs to do what they were trained to do. They left her standing there. Behind herher fell. Oing up the steps they said do not let her find out her father was dead. When she heard that, she fainted into his arms. He caught her tenderly and gently. Next week, the encore presentation looking at the public and private lives of our nations first ladies. Weeknights all this month at 9 00 eastern on cspan. Next a look at consolidating School Districts with examples in new jersey, North Carolina, and tennessee. A look at how technology and socioeconomic factors affect the Education Systems in small and rural towns. The host of the conversation was the center for american progress. The conversation lasted about an hour and a half. Good morning and welcome to the center for american progress. I am cynthia brown, Vice President for educational policy. Thank you for joining us for a party but small group, but we know that you are deeply interested in the topic for today, our own port on School Report on School District size. Thanks also to the panelists for participating today, ontributing to our ongoing conversation about education reform. Across the nation, policy makers have begun to look at the fundamental design of our Education System. Our education governance structures were built in a different era, and in many states, little attention has been given to improving the organization and design the states Education Systems. Over time, many states have allowed some exceedingly on governance systems to evolve. In nebraska, for example, there are a number of non districts School Districts that are noncontiguous. In other words, nested like islands within the confines of other districts. We have been long interested in the issue of school governance, and a few years ago, we and the thomas Ford Institute join forces to tackle the issue of governance and ask how our system of k12 governments might be modernized. As part of a collaboration, we released a book and education governments in january and we are planning a never report over the coming years. This paper is also part of that cooperation and it focuses in particular on the issue of School District size. The issue is timely, and many states and districts have recently been discussing consolidation efforts. In his 2011 budget address, ill. Gov. Pat quinn called for a commission to consider the number of School Districts in the state. As governor, ed rendell also pushed for consolidation in pennsylvania and proposed consolidating their 501 districts into 100 districts. Michigantes including and california have also discussed merging districts in recent years. We would like to talk more about these initiatives over the course of this event, but before i do, i would like to take a moment to introduce the panel. First we have charlie barone, policy director for democrats for education reform. He lives and grew up in new jersey and will give us a national and statelevel look at the issues. We are are also fortunate to have with us today doris terry williams. She is the executive director of the rule school and community trust. She was previously associate professor at North CarolinaCentral University school of education. Doris also led the institutions Teacher Education program. Now i would like to turn the podium over to my colleagues, a senior fellow here. He is the author of todays report and will delve deeper into the study and explain the methodology behind the report. After he concludes, we will have a Panel Discussion and some questions about the report and the issue, and then we will open it up to the audience. Thank you. Thank you, cindy. I also want to thank Juliana Herman for the help that she provided on this report. She did a lot of Data Analysis and writing while she was here at the center. I also want to thank rob hanna, who also provided a lot of work on the report. He is not here with us today. I wanted to make sure that both of them got credit for their hard work. When it comes to education, not all spending is people. Is equal. Some education dollars are spent for more productively than others. Some districts spend their resources well and show much higher levels of achievement than others. In this time of lagging revenues, policy makers have increasingly been paying attention to the question of whether or not were getting the most out of every school dollar. At the same time, we have an increased focus on governance. Part of the issue is that governance issues, structures, have led to haphazard spending configurations in states. In new jersey, for instance, one School District spends 50,000 per year to send their High School Students to another high school nearby. The issue is largely a governance one. All,w jersey, over spending per student is 17,000. The two strings of work, productivity and government, have led us to ask, can we restructure our Education System in ways that might save money and increase student achievement . The debate over School District size goes back centuries. School to reform small districts started in the early 19th century when education was highly localized and towns and cities were the major funders of schools. As states took responsibility for education, many chose to institutionalize town and city structures as local indication education agencies. Dourly the early 20thcentury, the push to consolidate became more aggressive, and the result of these efforts between 1940 and today, the number of districts dropped dramatically from 117,000 to just 14,000. Many areas race played a role in how districts consolidated in which did not. So did issues of wealth and poverty. Ittever the root cause is, is clear, small districts today are not necessarily isolated. In illinois, 91 of the states 392 districts are classified as suburban. 138ew jersey, there are suburban districts. Smaller is clear, districts have higher costs. Why . For one, small districts have Smaller Schools and larger overhead expenses. Another issue is they have to provide students with a full array of courses, even if there are fewer students. This could mean hiring a chemistry teacher for only four students. This problem is highlighted in states such as colorado where School Districts have on average a teacher india teacher to student ratio of 16 to 1. There is no easy answer to the problem of small districts. Policymakersme, have been focused on consolidation. Our report tries to put national and statebystate estimates on the scope of these problems. Let me explain how we approached it to give you the sense of our methodology. We relied on cost estimate studies produced and we used these studies to create a cost curve, and then we apply that to expenditures in the 2010 school year, the most recent available. Another way to think about it, if a School District has 750 students and the additional costs associated with that was 4 to get them to 1000, we would say that they had a loss of potential cost, and then calculated it out for the per people expenditure. These are not firm numbers. There are shortcomings with our methought methodology that i am happy to talk about in the q a, but what we wanted to highlight was this issue. The other thing i want to mention is there is an optimal size of School Districts. Most researchers put its between 2000 and 4000 students. We made sure to exclude rural districts. We used census code to do that because they wanted to highlight a lost capacity of School Districts that could function in a more productive way. Based on these calculations and the research, we uncover the following. Small nonremote districts may represent as much as 1 billion in unnecessary cost. In some states, these costs were relatively large. In new jersey, the estimated loss per capacity was about 100,000 per teacher. 650ates account for million in lost cost. The existence of small districts is hardly universal. In new york, we found the states small nonremote districts represent almost 100 million in lost cost. In illinois, the estimate is more than 90 million. In other states like maryland and florida, with larger districts, there was no lost cost associated with small districts. To address the problem of small districts, we present a number of recommendations, fully aware that there is not one of my solution here. One optimal solution here. We recommend states should generally avoid one size fits all approach is to maximizing district size. The report finds that many districts suffer from lost capacity due to their small size but there is no easy solution to the problem. The best solution for one district may not be the best for another. The evidence also suggests policy makers should take more into account the context of local districts and their needs. We also recommend states and districts reform their School Management systems. We believe policymakers should create Management System that are flexible on inputs and strict on outcomes. States and districts should also take the opportunity to rethink the role the School Districts play in our Education System. Finally, we recommend states and districts consider regionalization and the sharing of services and resources where possible. States can ease the burden of small districts through the creation of statesupported Education Service agencies to increase overall productivity. I will turn to the panel now to discuss this more in detail. I am happy to answer any questions you might have. We want to talk about small districts, and we want to expand the conversation into what i would call legitimately small districts, which are these more isolated, rural areas. Youro you identify as constituents . We consider rural, we used to locale codes 40, 41, 43 and those are School Districts that are geographically apart from urban centers. Some are considered remote and isolated. Others are small towns. Certainly, not those clustered around big metropolitan areas. No. That is not the situation in new jersey. Charlie, talk to us about your new jersey experience . People like me think of new jersey as a suburb of new york or philadelphia you do not think of Bruce Springsteen . [laughter] i had an aunt and uncle on the shore, but i was able to get to the outer parts of new jersey. That i have installed in insulted you your state, could u talk about it . We are used to it. Actually, really nice in some places, but we play that down. Just think of the opening of the sopranos. Ais report got me thinking lot about new jersey. It is a unique state. You do not have one large city that dominates the state, like you do in new york, illinois, california. You have a lot of smaller cities and a lot of small towns. Part of the reason for that is they are old. You have real communities, so it is different than what you have in virginia, maryland, places like arlington. They are not really towns, so they do not have the same identification. One thing that is different, you have a lot of tourist areas, particularly along the coast. They are dense in terms of housing, but the yearround residents, the number is very low. Mays thinking about cape county. I do not know what it costs them 50,000 to send their kids to a regional school, but there are not a lot of fulltime cape may residents who are there all year. In some ways, it may make sense to send their kids to the regional school. Further consolidation there may be limited because they are already going away to get this to this regional school, and they would have to go further if they would consolidate more. I am glad the report said you do not want a onesizefitsall solution, you want something that is tailored to the state and the goal of academic achievement. Where does consolidation fit into this . First, the issue with cape may, to get into that area. Byy are being charged that the other School Districts. Ae other School District had choice of six funding formulas they could choose from to charge cape may. This highlights the broader issue i am no expert on cape may but this issue of governance structures over all where you have a lot of these suburban k6 School Districts. With that comes a lot of additional costs. Back to your question, a lot of policy makers recently have been looking to the issue of consolidation. We have seen it in michigan, pennsylvania, illinois, and it seems like a onesizefitsall approach, but the evidence is mixed across research. You have a lot of destruction in communities when consolidation has been pushed down. A lot of additional cost with house School Districts that have to work with the buildings that are closed or shut down. So this argument is not necessarily that consolidation is necessarily the wrong approach is the wrong approach to take. When we have Consolidation First pushed, this was the 1950s, 1960s. Today we have the internet, which allows us to deliver education much more flexibly, we have a better sense of managing systems for performance. The end target is to increase student achievement. We knew this was a problem, but we need to think more broadly about how we can provide these districts with better support, whether it is regional cost saving measures or allow them greater flexibility around staffing, that allows them to take advantage of supports and capacities that are out there. Doris, i know that some of your members have been very concerned about consolidation. What is the landscape like . Rural is very diverse. It is difficult to say what is happening in Rural America in general. What we have found is, particularly in the south and southwest, rural School Districts have been consolidated almost to the hills. Very large districts in very large districts in their role self. We think, to a large extent, we have reached the economies of scale in these communities. That makes sense for those communities. But what happens, for the most part, you do not achieve cost savings and the quality that most proponents of consolidation assume that you will achieve by consolidation. Particularly in the rural sites, you see it increased costs around transportation, lots more travel time for kids on buses, a much longer day. We have kids getting on the bus before daylight and they are getting off after sunset. When you factor those things into the formula of what is working, what should be the response to the small School Problem and i do not like