Arnold Kling opens his most recent essay, The Big Three, by citing Andrew J. Coulson:
We have been inexorably centralizing control over the schools in this country for 150 years. We’ve gone from one-room schoolhouses overseen directly by the parents of the children who attended them to sprawling bureaucracies that consume half of the operating budgets of their respective states. We’ve gone from 127,000 school districts in 1932 to fewer than 15,000 today — despite a massive increase in the number of students.
One of Kling’s “big three” issues is education — and limiting the damage done by government bureaucratization of schooling:
For example, in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, the local newspaper gave the following figures about the school Budget: total enrollment, 137,798; total employees, 21,840; total budget $1.98 billion; percent of budget devoted to employee compensation, 89%.Using those numbers, it is easy to calculate that the ratio of students to employees is 6.3, even though the typical class size is probably 4 times that amount. A clear inference is that most of the employees are not classroom teachers. However, these non-teaching staff are well compensated, since another exercise in simple arithmetic shows that the average compensation per employee is $80,686.
As a parent, I have observed that the really bad teachers and the really good teachers are destined for administrative positions. For bad teachers, administration is a place where the County can hide them. For good teachers, administrative positions are a reward, offering higher pay along with freedom from the extra workload of classroom teaching (the non-class time required to grade papers, prepare lessons plans, and so on) as well as its emotional stresses.