In the business world, an example of vertical integration could be a manufacturing company which expands by purchasing the company which provides raw materials and by purchasing the company which distributes and retails its finished products.
An example of horizontal integration might be a regional supplier of one product purchasing the suppliers of the same product in neighboring regions, or even by acquiring other suppliers of the product in its own region.
Applying these principles to education, one might conclude that, in many cases, American education is vertically integrated. Many public schools systems, and quite a few private ones, cover the supply chain from Kindergarten through 12th grade. Some even include pre-K.
On the other hand, there seems to be a lack of horizontal integration. Although the nationwide impact of federal policies is growing, it remains a small influence on the day-to-day operations of most public schools. The impact of state governments varies somewhat among the fifty states, from those states which allow local school boards to have the majority of the decision-making power to those state governments which make significant educational policy decisions and leave it to the local boards to implement the statewide policies.
In any case, it is plausible to hypothesize that public education systems in the United States are more vertically integrated than horizontally integrated.
What would be the effect of reversing this situation? How would it be if education were more horizontally integrated, and less vertically integrated?
This might happen if, e.g., the K through 12 system were broken into three units: the K through 5 primary school, the 6 through 8 middle school, and the 9 through 12 high school. Of course, these divisions are somewhat arbitrary.
Having divided the system into three segments, each of the segments could merge with neighboring regional segments at the same level. The K through 5 segment in one town or county could merge with the K through 5 segment in a neighboring town or county.
The total number of educational systems would at first be increased, as each system is divided into three systems, but then the number of systems would decrease, as the systems which serve the same levels merge with each other.
A K-12 system serves 13 levels. A school district with 20,000 pupils serves approximately 1,500 pupils at each level.
A system with more horizontal and less vertical integration would serve 20,000 pupils — for example, in grades 9 through 12 — by serving 4 levels with 5,000 pupils at each level.
By breaking the K-12 range into three units, more focus and specialization could bring expertise to each level.
It seems odd that the currently widespread K-12 model addresses the education of five-year-old Kindergarten pupils in the same breath with which it addresses the education of eighteen-year-old 12th-grade students. Is it efficient to place such disparate enterprises into the same administration?
If this project were carried out, then eventually one might see utterly separate teacher training programs at the university level: Why would a Kindergarten teacher and a twelfth-grade calculus teacher attend the same “school of education” at the university? Eventually, they might have utterly separate professional associations and collective bargaining units. There would be separate boards of education at the state and local levels.
These suggestions are not purely hypothetical. In several countries around the world, variations of these ideas have been implemented.
With a decrease in vertical integration, more proficiency in teaching could be developed for each level. Pedagogical methodologies would be more finely-tuned.
