Rhode Island’s public school population is roughly similar to that of Dallas, but it is divvied into 36 school districts. So we have 36 superintendents overseeing 36 special education directors, 36 bus contracts, 36 lunch contracts, and a great many other expensive redundancies.

Clearly, consolidating school bureaucracies would save lots of money, but how should we go about it?

Maine provides us with a cautionary tale. There, the politicians passed a law that is forcing school districts to combine with each other until each new district has at least 2,500 students. The goal is to reduce the number of school districts in the state from 290 to 80. On the surface, this makes sense.

Schools are complex organizations, so each little district has its own way of doing things. It’s like forcing two unrelated families to learn to live in a larger house together. Every little rule about who cleans the bathroom or washes the dishes must be renegotiated. So how are the Maine districts working out their differences?

They fight, that’s how. It’s a mess. And the resulting chaos and bureaucratic resistance is reducing the prospect of any immediate cost savings.

Rhode Island would be far better off following Minnesota’s example. Its technique was to pass a series of laws allowing all children, K-12, to attend whatever school the family chooses, provided there is room. The money followed the students. The parents were thrilled, and the bureaucracies had no choice but to adjust.

Unappealing or incompetent districts lost students, so rather than run astronomically expensive programs for the remaining students, they merged with stronger districts. Good schools filled to capacity, which is the most cost-efficient way to run them. Bad ones closed, which also saves money. Kids generally got better, more efficient schools.

And there wasn’t so much to fight about. Consolidations took place. Tax money flowed more directly to good schools and away from bureaucratic waste.

To learn more about this, I spoke with Joe Nathan, the director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute. Nathan had a hand in writing several of the Minnesota school-choice bills, including the nation’s first charter school legislation. He was also an author of the 1991 Open Enrollment legislation that offered public-school choice to all families.

He said, “Your problem [of too many districts] would be solved under open enrollment. Ours was a very clear experience of school districts changing practices and consolidating because the parents can leave. It put power in the parents’ hands. So, in some cases, districts consolidated, but in others they got together and cooperated so that they could offer more options that would be attractive to the families.”

A high-achieving school in Cyrus was about to close because of declining population, but filled right up with passage of the open enrollment law.

Rhode Island’s school-age population is dropping, so lots of schools are running inefficiently at partial capacity. The students at Potowomut School, in Warwick, achieved 100-percent proficiency on the state’s NECAP reading test, but the school is closing for lack of enrollment. Makes no sense. Parents, not bureaucracies, should decide which schools should close and which shouldn’t.

Nathan says, “I entered this issue in the 1970s for social justice reasons. All kids need options. Not crummy options, good options. Some kids flourish in core knowledge, Montessori, or two-way bilingual. Others need a multiple-intelligence school, international baccalaureate, or one that teaches how to repair computers. Every kid should have transportation and no admissions test. Families have options for daycare, nursery school, college, so why not public school?”

Instead of having many one-size-fits-all schools, Minnesota has cultivated a great variety of school options.

According to a survey administered by Nathan’s Center in 2005, 80 percent of the respondents said parents should be allowed to choose their child’s school. Of the respondents under 50 years old, 92 percent endorsed public school choice.

Teachers need options too. Nathan says, “Some districts turned to their teachers and asked what they wanted to do to be attractive to the families. There’s no question that teachers, especially young teachers, want to create schools that make sense. And if we’re serious about treating teachers as professionals, they need to be involved in creating these new kinds of schools.”

That said, however, Nathan warns, “No one thing is a panacea — not more money, not better teacher training, not Bill Gates. This [open enrollment] has not solved all the education problems in the state, but it has led to positive outcomes.”

Minnesota shows that pulling down the walls among school districts and giving the public the power to choose schools for the kids create incentives for districts to merge, while providing much better school options.

What’s not to like?

In last week’s column, the arts group that shares space with Highlander school is really City Arts (not New Urban Arts). Both groups are terrific.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.