A tidal wave of school construction is rolling across the nation.

California voters on March 2 approved $12 billion -- on top of $22 billion already voted in the past five years -- for new and refurbished schools. New Jersey is in the midst of a $12.3 billion school construction program, largest in its history. Ohio has a four-year, $10.5 billion program. A new Maryland study asserts that $2.85 billion in repairs and replacements are needed.

These multibillions will doubtless do real good. Millions of kids will be rescued from outdated, crowded, sometimes filthy or dilapidated school settings. And there should be a real dollars-and-cents benefit, concludes Jonathan Weiss in a KnowledgeWorks Foundation research report scheduled for release later this month.

Modernized schools, notes Weiss, often trigger higher student achievement. New and refurbished schools tend to raise local property values and help revitalize depressed neighborhoods. Businesses are drawn to places with quality schools.

But some troublesome questions are surfacing: Are new schools being built where they should be? Are too many serviceable older schools -- and the downtowns and neighborhoods they stand in -- being abandoned? Are we building the right size of school for best student achievement? Is creative architecture going into the new schools? Or are too many new schools being designed and built with what Steven Litt of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer calls "a homogenized blandness" that recalls chain restaurants, drugstores and strip shopping centers?

Governing magazine leaps into the location controversy with a March cover story -- "Edge-ucation: the compulsion to build schools in the middle of nowhere."

As a prime example, Governing cites a 3,000-student high school built four years ago in Mount Pleasant, S.C., a Charleston suburb. The school was constructed outside of walking distance of any of students. The land was donated by developers who figured the school would trigger demand -- and indeed, it has begun to affect the 2,000 surrounding acres. One critic predicts "a big-box nightmare hell."

Faulty research, Governing's Rob Gurwitt notes, has forced many communities to abandon, rather than refurbish, older, in-town schools that undergird their downtowns and neighborhoods. School boards have blindly accepted an unsubstantiated claim, printed in American School and University magazine a half century ago, that if the price to renovate an older school is more than half the cost of building a new one, school districts should swallow the extra expense and build new.

A counterrevolution appears under way. In South Carolina, Republican Gov. Mark Sanford last year seized on a report by the S.C. Coastal Conservation League showing how school sprawl was making it far more difficult for children to walk to school. Sanford, in his State of the State address, attacked the "construction of massive, isolated schools." With a bipartisan legislative group, he got a bill passed to overturn state law requiring that new schools sit on large lots.

Michigan has just produced the most thoroughly researched -- and stinging -- indictment of school building practices anywhere. Its authors are an unusual pair: the Michigan Land Use Institute, a smart growth advocacy organization, and the state's Chamber of Commerce.

They found new school construction has raised Michigan's property taxes and tripled related debt from $4 billion to $12 billion since 1994. Since 1996, school districts have built 500 new schools and closed 278 older ones, though school population has grown just 4.5 percent. Every new school they analyzed had cost more than renovating an older one.

All this is negative for existing communities and Michigan's economic competitiveness, the Chamber and Land Use Institute concluded. So reverse course, they urge: first try to renovate existing schools; second, construct them in existing neighborhoods; and only as a last resort build schools in farm fields.

The report also argues that school building decisions should be integrated with local land use planning. What that means is revoking the power school boards have exercised across the nation -- choosing school sites as they please, no matter how adverse their decisions may be to neighborhoods and downtowns, or to a community's overall growth priorities.

Curbing school boards' power is bound to be a political battle -- and so far it has erupted in only a few states. But there's an old truism -- institutions rarely reform voluntarily. In an era of fiscal stringency, with an alliance of forces for reduced state spending and for community-sensitive, anti-sprawl planning, perhaps it's not too much to hope that change is finally on the wing.

Neal

Peirce