Administrative positions at K-12 schools increased by 700 percent since 1950 — seven times faster than the growth of student enrollment.
We’ve gone from 127,000 school districts in 1932 to fewer than 15,000 today
In theory, the consolidation of school districts should reduce, rather than increase, the administrative burden.
If you multiply a 7-fold increase in administrators by an 8-fold decrease in school districts, we have seen a 56-fold increase in administrators per school district over the last several decades. That is, for every 10 administrators in a typical school district in 1950, there are over 500 administrators today.
Probably, but there is a confounding issue. According to William Fischel’s Making the Grade, the consolidation was largely driven by the desire to create high schools. So while the 56 fold increase in administrators does seem to me out of whack, and I wouldn’t discount theories about states desiring to centralize education further -it’s entirely possible that the massive increase in administrators is the result of needing those administrators to run high schools, and if we were running high schools in all 127k 1932 school districts, there would be even more.
Might some skepticism be in place about what appears to be a nearly incredible result conveyed by the Daily Caller from the Friedman Foundation? A quick look at the study’s summary, for example, suggests that ‘administrative staff’ are defined in their statistics as “anyone except a classroom teacher”. Since schools do a number of things today that schools in the 1950s didn’t do — some of which we might consider essential parts of ‘teaching’ even though those doing them are not, pro forma, teachers — much of the supposed 56-fold increase in ‘administrators’ may be rather clumsily mis-identified. We also offer more specialized eduction to a wider range of students. Does a special education classroom with a teacher, 3 skilled aides, a health coordinator, etc., really represent a 4x increase in ‘administrators’? And if so, is it really the same ‘bad thing’ that the Daily Caller wants us to imagine…offices full of paper-pushing drones and overpaid and overdegreed intermediate supervisors?
This is not to say that administrative bloat, whatever the causes (among which both public pressure on politicians to watch out for, monitor, and account for all sorts of stuff is not the least), is not a reality, nor that it shouldn’t be restrained, and I’m happy to agree that school administrations should be examined with care. It’s just to say that when a quotable number, indeed a meme-able number, pops out of highly partisan sources, we should keep our hands near our wallets and count the silverware carefully.
PS: it’s also worth noting that the 1950s baseline…based on many quite small school districts, may well have concealed a good deal of part-time administrative work undertaken by teachers. In the early 1960s, I went to an elementary school — which was its own district — that had about 100 students in grades 1-6. And miracle of miracles: the staff of the school consisted of 4 teachers, a lunchroom monitor and a janitor. In fact, there appear to have been no ‘administrators’ at all! How did they do it…
The answer might suggest one component in the “56-fold” increase that the Friedman foundation found.
Most of the decline in the number of school districts occurred during the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s. Thus the changing baseline years (1932 in one, and 1950 in the other) are misleading.
Secondly, most of this change was changing from single room schools to schools where children of the same age were put into grades and separated from one another. That kind of change increases the demands on administration.
Finally, the number of pupils increases during this time as well. You’ll notice they do administrators per district rather than the more customary administrators per pupil.