Overcrowded schools - more answers to life's problems

Clarity Remix:

The Chicago Public School system is terribly overcrowded, and the Archdiocese of Chicago is closing parochial schools because of low enrollment and increased operating costs. If the root cause of these school closures is the inability of parents to pay for tuition, then the answer is obvious: the City of Chicago should offer vouchers to parents that wish to enroll their child in a parochial school (or any other private school for that matter).

Here are some quick facts to put this into a proper perspective:

The CPS budget is about $4.6 Billion, and there are about 431,000 students enrolled (I'm getting theses figures from all over the internet, so I might be mistaken somewhere along the line), that comes out to about $10,672 per student. Tuition for a parochial school runs somewhere in the ballpark of $3,400. Let's totally circumvent the whole debate about whether public schools or private schools are "better", and assume that that they are at least equal.

Here are some more fun facts for you:
This means that approximately 161,419 Chicago students are attending overcrowded schools (37% of the total student body)! The Chicago Public Schools have already spent over $2.4 billion for school construction and repairs, but despite these record accomplishments, overcrowding remains a problem at both the high school and elementary school levels.

Most of the schools charted in the prior link are somewhere between 120% - 150% overcrowded, so let's assume that of the 161,000 overcrowded students in CPS, all of those schools are at 150% capacity. Essentially, that means that CPS needs to find room for about 54,000 students. That means that CPS has spent about $44,444 per overcrowded student that needs to be placed into a new school. Holy cats! That's compared to $3,400 per student if they had given them all vouchers, or $183,600,000. Granted, the Chicago Archdiocese is not really in a position to accept that many students all at once, but there's also no reason for me to believe that they couldn't expand their capacity over time all-the-while keeping their tuition relatively constant. Additionally, it wouldn't necessarily require a full tuition voucher. Some parents might take their kids out of CPS if they were given a $500 voucher, some might leave for $1,000, you get the idea.

So, the first piece of information to store in your memory bank is that if Chicago had cut 54,000 kids a check to go to a private school, they could have saved themselves $2.2B. The second piece of information that you might want to store in your memory bank is the new budget per student: $11,714.59. Wait a minute... is that right? There were 431,000 students before, and now there are 54,000 less, so that makes 377,000. The City had a budget of $4.6B, they gave out $183.6M in vouchers, so their new budget is $4,416.4M. $4,416.4M divided by 377,000 students is $11,714.59. So, yes, the vouchers would be depleting the total CPS budget, but they would be taking more students out of CPS than they would money. That means that CPS would have MORE money per student after the vouchers were given out.

The real question is, why haven't we already done this? Well, there's an underlying assumption in all this that isn't very pretty. Lay-offs. If a school is 150% overcrowded, and they send a significant proportion of their students to parochial schools to get an education, the school is going to be left with a much smaller student body, a smaller budget, and a whole bunch of extra teachers and administrators that aren't really needed? In fact, the only way this works is if CPS right-sizes by laying off the extra teachers and administrators they don't need anymore. This isn't really a problem for the teaching population because, guess what, now that there are an extra 54,000 students going to private schools, there are 100's of job openings in the private sector at sectarian and non-sectarian schools. If you're good at what you do, you shouldn't have a problem getting a job at any one of these fine establishments. Really the only loser is the Teacher's Union, because these teachers will have non-union jobs.

How can such a program be administrated? Great question. Start by figuring out how many students CPS can reasonably handle. Take the number of students CPS has, subtract what they can handle, this is how many vouchers you give out. Who gets a voucher? There are three criteria: 1) they have to be enrolled in CPS, 2) they have to have a letter of acceptance from an acredited private school, 3) they can make up whatever other criterium they want at this point. If Chicago wanted to give vouchers to the poor kids, the dumb kids, the smart kids, the rich kids, the bad kids, the good kids... it doesn't really matter, as long as they reduce the overcrowding. The reality is that there are probably more overcrowded students than there are open slots in the private sector, which means that there is potential for more private schools to be built. So much the better, because if the private sector is building schools, then the state doesn't have to, and the private sector tends to build most everything faster and cheaper than the state does.

Last comment: how do you measure success? Simple: test scores and college entrances across the Chicago student population. So often we get bogged down in which schools are "better": public or private. The only thing that matters is how the student population as a whole is performing. If mixing public and private education results in higher test scores, higher graduation rates, and more college acceptance letters, then the program should be considered successful, regardless of where those students are coming from.