The comments at This Road is Designed to Kill You have drifted a bit off topic — from the safety effects of traffic roundabouts to incentives for people to live closer to work to flight from city schools to the influence of school district size on student achievement. (Go ahead and read them if you haven't. I won't make many explicit references here.)
Running through the discussion is a divide that often surfaces here, and in fact simmers under most of what passes for debate in politics today. Whether the topic is health care, schools, the economy, taxes or infrastructure, it boils down to the merits of government intervention versus free market solutions as ways to solve big problems.
Another, less common way to put it is this: Communities thrive by redistributing wealth or by maximizing opportunities to accumulate wealth.
For example, Mark and Jeff had a back-and-forth over whether a single, large school district that allocated dollars first to lagging schools would help improve student performance, especially in inner city schools.
Mark says: "Turn all contiguous metropolitan areas into a single school district, with funding prioritized so as to deal with the lowest performing schools first."
Jeff responds: "The measure that shows the greatest correlation with school performance isn't funding, and it isn't class size. It's school district size. Kids in smaller school districts do far better."
Jeff is correct that studies show smaller school districts tend to have better student achievement, but size matters only insofar as it negatively affects the factors that really produce learning outcomes.
It's worth noting that school districts usually are large because a) they were formed to encompass large city boundaries with their diverse populations and the education challenges that go with them. Or b) they were consolidated from smaller districts experiencing enrollment declines, substandard offerings or funding issues that led them to seek economies of scale. In both cases, upsized districts are a consequence of factors other than pure pursuit of improved student achievement.
Mark is talking about disparity of income between districts, not size; a super district would be just one way to redistribute money to aid lower-performing schools. Of course, a similar move — giving more responsibility for school funding to the state — was tried and then has been slowly dismantled by Gov. Pawlenty. But redistributing school aid dollars isn't really the whole answer, either. Living in economically advantaged communities tends to be accompanied by other factors that relate to school performance, and these advantages are more difficult to export — or to benefit students who are bused in to those communities.
Growth & Justice delivered a research-based report last year that summarized three factors that were most critical for getting students from pre-K all the way through college. Each of these has financial implications, not necessarily tied to what we think of as "school funding."
To over-simplify my point, I'd say the education discussion drifted toward comfortable positions for Mark and Jeff, but got richer as they shared the research and the complexities became more evident.
In another post, I'll discuss one other angle their discussion raised — taking personal credit for successes and blaming government for failures.