Corruption Is Part of Why School District ‘Democracy’ Is Rigged and Wasteful

In 2019, the Scottsdale Unified School District in Arizona spent over $20 million to tear down and completely rebuild a school named Pima Elementary. This year it voted to close the school.

Pima Elementary, designed for up to 840 students, reopened at less than 60% of that capacity, and it continued to decline. This fall, just seven years later, the school building won’t contain a single student.

Far from a one-off tale of district mismanagement, the closing of a brand new $20 million school building illustrates how easy special interest groups find it to manipulate school districts.

A nationwide baby bust had begun eight years before the bond election, meaning that there were already fewer students to go around. Likewise, the high price of housing in Scottsdale became a significant deterrent to young families locating there.

The district annually pays for an outside firm to provide a report on demographic and enrollment trends, so none of this should have caught members by surprise. Eight years into a baby bust that began in 2008 and despite standing at only 55% of physical capacity, Scottsdale Unified pushed for and received a $229 million bond for buildings in 2016.

Critics of school choice always attempt to scapegoat family options, but district open enrollment remains the largest form of choice, and Scottsdale Unified is a net beneficiary of the give-and-take between districts.

Approximately 26% of Scottsdale Unified students come from outside of their attendance boundaries, and without students transferring in from other districts, far more Scottsdale schools would long ago have closed.

Arizona Department of Education enrollment reports show that if open enrollment, charter schools, and the state’s education savings account program were all eliminated, the net impact on Scottsdale Unified enrollment would be only a few hundred students. In the process of eliminating choice programs, thousands of students would leave their preferred schools, including many in Scottsdale Unified itself.

In other words, the district both gains and loses students through choice, and choice is not the primary driver of enrollment loss.

The district had substantial underutilized space when it decided to ask voters for over a quarter of a billion dollars in building funds in 2016. Why then did a school district with declining enrollment and abundant underutilized space go $229 million in debt on new buildings?

The answer has everything to do with politics and nothing to do with education outcomes.

Building district schools is a profitable activity, with some studies showing districts spending about one-third more per square foot than public charter schools.

School district elections have low visibility and low rates of voter turnout. Low visibility, low turnout, and high profits are a recipe for corruption.

The Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and KJZZ reported in 2017 on financial relationships school districts in the Phoenix area had with a small group of architects, construction companies, and subcontractors. They found that architects, construction firms, and subcontractors accounted for nearly all the financial contributions made to Maricopa County (which contains the greater Phoenix metropolitan area) school districts’ bond and override campaigns from 2013-2016, including the Scottsdale Unified election.

Such pay-to- play crony capitalism would be more than dubious even in a fast-growing district, but it has also been happening in districts with shrinking enrollments like Scottsdale Unified.

In the years following the bond election, authorities charged Scottsdale’s superintendent with 18 felonies, including procurement fraud and misuse of public monies. The Superintendent and other top administrators resigned, but the dubious construction like that at Pima Elementary proceeded. Multiple schools were torn down and rebuilt, and Pima may only be the first of these schools to close, rather than the last.

Scottsdale Unified is far from the only district to build new space despite declining enrollment. A recent study published by the Common Sense Institute of Arizona found that Arizona school districts statewide have a staggering 78 million square feet of underutilized or vacant school space, which could accommodate as many as 630 thousand additional students. For context, school districts statewide educate approximately 800 thousand students statewide.

National exams of student academic achievement show approximately the same success for Arizona school districts in teaching mathematics and reading as they have had in physical plant management. Spending per pupil is up, and achievement is down.

Arizona charter schools outscore all statewide averages on both eighth-grade reading and math despite getting less taxpayer spending per pupil, while the scores of Arizona school districts rank near the bottom.

The unfortunate reality to confront is that school districts are not so much broken as they are working perfectly for the interests of their major shareholders. These include not just builders but also unionized employees.