2018 Volume 44 Pages 139-155
This paper aims to reveal how much expenditure could be cut through school consolidations at the city level.
Many studies on education analyze school consolidations from diverse standpoints, such as the population reduction problem, school size, local finance, the relationship between boards of education and local residents, commuting distance, and educational outcome, among others. This paper focuses specifically on the effect of school consolidation on local finance. There are two problems with previous research studies. First, they analyze financial data compiled by municipalities. From this position, it is not clear how much expenditure could be cut by reducing one school at a time. Second, the financial conditions after school consolidation were not revealed. To reveal the effect of school consolidations on local finance, it is necessary to analyze financial data before and after school consolidation.
To solve these problems, this paper conducted two analyses. First, it analyzed the change in expenditure in the schools’ financial data before and after school consolidation. Through the use of school financial data, we can determine the change in expenditure for each school that is consolidated. Second, it analyzed the decrease in tax allocations to local governments by calculating basic financial needs. It then compared expenditure reduction and revenue reduction, and determined if the former was higher than the latter. This paper concludes that school consolidation results in expenditure reduction.
To conduct this analysis, this paper focuses on Yokohama City, which publishes financial data on each school’s homepage. However, since the publishing years of each school are different, this paper focuses on two cases of school consolidation, which resulted in obtaining numerous years’ school financial data before and after consolidation. In both cases, two primary schools were consolidated into one primary school.
Through analysis, this paper pointed out the following four points. First, expenditure per school increased after school consolidation. Second, by consolidating two schools into one, the total expenditure of schools that were consolidated decreased. However, if the number of classes decreases significantly, revenue reduction becomes higher than expenditure reduction and there is no expenditure cut effect. Third, the effects of cutting expenditure continued after school consolidation. Fourth, expenditure per pupil decreases immediately after school consolidation but eventually increases. In particular, supply expenses per pupil increase. When considering the educational environment of pupils from a financial standpoint, there may be positive effects of school consolidation in terms of enrichment of material resources like teaching materials, papers, and stationery among others.
