In looking through the North Carolina Education Alliance web site I came across a study by Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters of the Manhattan Institute. They looked for a connection between the size of a school district and the high school graduation rates. They found a statistically significant relationship between decreasing the size of a school district and an increasing high school graduation rate.
The authors of the study believe that smaller school districts give parents more choice in selecting where to send their children. This pushes school districts to be more focused on improving the schools. In the report the authors explored some possible benefits to increasing the amount of choice parents have in general in picking a school.
There were a number of interesting points in the study. One that stood out to me was that their best estimate is "about 71% of the class of 2002 graduated high school with a regular diploma." This by itself is a pretty amazing and scary statistic. They then go on to point out this is an even bigger problem with many minorities.
Another interesting point was "Our analysis shows that simply spending more money is not an acceptable solution to the dropout problem. Our finding that spending more money per pupil has no distinguishable relationship with changes in graduation rates, which is consistent with a wide body of previous research (see Hanushek 1996), implies that getting more students into caps and gowns requires real reforms to the educational system."
The study provides support for those who want to break up the super-sized school districts. It is still a bit mind boggling to me that there are school districts with over a hundred thousand students. My city is only about a hundred thousand people.
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