Chapter 10: Regulation Versus Markets: The Case for Greater Flexibility in the Market for Public School Teachers

Public K–12 education is a decentralized industry with many small employers and a handful of very large ones. There are roughly 85,000 establishments (schools) organized into 15,000 firms (school districts) that employ approximately 2.7 million teachers. There is considerable variation in the size of these school district “firms,” with a good deal of concentration in the largest of them. In 1995–1996, the largest 216 districts enrolled 25,000 or more students. This accounted for 1.5 percent of all districts, but enrolled 30.5 percent of students. At the same time, 70.9 percent of districts enrolled fewer than 1,000 students. These small firms accounted for 13.1 percent of enrollments (U.S. Department of Education, 1998, Table 90).