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The Law of Diminishing Returns
This Pepperdine University study found that as school funding increased in California, the percentage of spending that made it to classrooms decreased. In other words, more and more of the spending “went to administrators, clerks, and technical staff, and less to teachers, textbooks, materials and teacher aides”.
As most classroom teachers will agree, it gets worse. Understandably, the new members of the bureaucracy feel the need to justify their existence, and soon many of their activities start getting in the teachers’ way - what with increased paperwork requirements, visits from consultants, unrealistic pedagogical fiats, introduction of expensive but useless technology, and so forth. Perhaps some of our teacher readers would be willing to elaborate….
The obvious answer is to eliminate the school board middlemen, and give all of the money directly to individual schools.
“Understandably, the new members of the bureaucracy feel the need to justify their existence, and soon many of their activities start getting in the teachers’ way - what with increased paperwork requirements, visits from consultants, unrealistic pedagogical fiats, introduction of expensive but useless technology, and so forth.“
You read my mind!
A concrete example from West Hill:
We attracted an experienced owner of a local Hairdressing school to teach our new Hairstyling course. The problem? The only suitable location for the class was a portable - they lack access to water and sewer. Neither the school nor the board had any funding to upgrade facilities. Our principal had a great idea - combine it with a fashion class and turn it into a new high-skills major and tap into Ministry funding for these new courses (about $20,000). No money ever arrived. Why? Well the board needed to hire a new administrator to co-ordinate these new HSM courses (most of which weren’t running because they needed the funding).