A website called Education Next posted the following:
Ah-ha. Those numbers are hard to argue with. The education department may characterize an additional assistant principal as “instructional” spending, and the assistant principal may even have some roles such as coaching teachers or disciplining students that affect instruction. But an administrator is an administrator, regardless of whether she is based in a school or in a district office, just like beer is beer regardless of whether it is bought at the supermarket or at the liquor store.
To put this into perspective, from 1990 through 2011, K-12 student enrollment in America increased .04 percent, from 2012 through fall 2023, K-12 student enrollment in American increased 5.2 percent (article here). I don’t object to the fact that the number of teachers increased by a higher percentage, but I do question the number of administrators, principals, and assistant principals hired between 2000 and 2017. It appears to me that the problem is not the about of money we are spending on education, but rather where we are putting that money.
The article at Education Next concludes:
The optimal number of administrators, or of federal and state regulations, is something about which reasonable people may differ. Reasonable people may also differ about the optimal ratio of administrators to teachers, and of both to students. Not all administrators are bad; surely there are cases in which hiring additional administrators at the school or district level have improved student outcomes. Without full-time administrators, compliance burdens fall more heavily on classroom teachers or risk going unmet. Some charter schools have strategically split the principal role into an operations leader and an instructional leader, a move that adds an administrator but may well be good for school quality.
One reason, though, that politicians got away with allowing the number of $100,000-a-year administrators to grow four or seven times as fast as the number of teachers is that even when someone smart like Philip K. Howard does blow the whistle on it, the first reaction of too many academics and mainstream journalists is to snipe at him and deny the reality of the situation, instead of investigating or following up the news he unearthed.
It seems that there are many reasons our schools are failing. It’s time to examine all of those reasons and change the current paradigm.