SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

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.