Between 1997 and 2003 I was in the seminary, being formed for the priesthood. Before that I was a high paid engineer (at least by some accounts). I was not particularly concerned about escalating inefficiencies in schools back in the mid 90s, so I generally voted in favor of school levies whenever they showed up on a ballot. While in the seminary I was more concerned about finishing the assigned reading. Thus, I felt like a rube when I first got clued in to the gap between public and parochial school costs. Roughly speaking, the former is about double the latter, and has been for some time, long after cheap labor has evaporated. What accounts for the discrepancy? Why is a parochial education half as expensive in real dollar terms? It would take a room full of auditors to explain it completely. Some of it has to do with having fewer unfunded mandates. Some of it is due to lower salaries and benefits in the parochial sector. The bulk is accounted for by more efficient administration, more decentralization and fewer layers of management.
The pressure to consolidate parochial school districts will change all of that, of course. In the short term, there will be greater efficiencies in the use of facilities as dying schools close and their neighbors pick up the students whose parents decide to remain in the system. In the long run, however, increasing consolidation will mean increasing the expense of overhead to finance more highly paid executives in increasingly centralized administrations.
For those who have been fighting these wars in the trenches for the past few decades, none of this is likely to be revelatory. Nevertheless, it may come as a surprise to some that a few state courts are turning a jaundiced eye to bureaucratic poor-mouthing. An article in Fox News, "Texas Ruling Paves Way for Education Reform," shows that, in Texas at least, the public debate on the hegemony of public schools is beginning to get a new head of steam.