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Heritage
Foundation
Friedman
Foundation Takes a
Critical Look at Administrative Bloat in Public Schools
By Lindsey Burke
October 24, 2012
The
Friedman Foundation has
published an excellent report detailing the administrative bloat
plaguing our
nation’s public schools. The School Staffing Surge: Decades of
Employment
Growth in America’s Public Schools shows dramatic increases in teaching
and
non-teaching staff over the past five decades despite modest increases
in
student enrollment.
As
we detailed in a recent report
on growth in non-teaching positions in public schools across the
country,
student enrollment has increased just 8 percent since 1970, while the
number of
teachers has increased 60 percent, and the number of non-teaching
administrative and other staff has increased 138 percent. (continues
below
chart)
The
Friedman report, authored by
Ben Scafidi, PhD, takes an even longer look, demonstrating that since
1950,
public school enrollment has increased 96 percent, while the number of
teachers
has increased 252 percent and the number of non-teaching personnel
(administrators and other staff) has increased an astonishing 702
percent. “Put
differently,” Scafidi notes, “the rise in non-teaching staff was more
than
seven times faster than the increase in students”:
Between
1950 and 2009, the
pupil-staff ratio declined to 7.8 students per public school employee
from 19.3
students per public school employee. By 2009, there were fewer than
eight
public school students per adult employed in the public school system.
The drop
in the pupil-teacher ratio also was large—the pupil-teacher ratio was
27.5
students per teacher in 1950 and only 15.4 in 2009.
Scafidi
also shows how this
administrative bloat has affected schools on a state-by-state basis
(and uses
an interactive map to make the point). Of note: “Nine states with
declining
student populations had significant increases in public school
personnel—D.C.,
Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota,
Wyoming, and
Vermont.”
The
Friedman report notes that the
dramatic reduction in class size over the decades has not led to
increases in
student achievement. Why? As Scafidi reports, an increase in teacher
quantity
has not produced an increase in teacher quality:
As
public schools have reduced
class sizes continually since at least 1950, they have had to hire more
teachers. And, the evidence is in—the disparity in effectiveness across
teachers is considerable. Accordingly, state governments and local
public
school boards should have been more concerned with improving teacher
effectiveness than lowering class sizes.
Read
the rest of the article with charts at
Heritage Foundation
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