I'm not prepared to write an entire article on the subject and I'm not sure it would be wise for me to publicly criticize my wife's employer. But I can at least elaborate on how I feel the funding is being mismanaged.
The biggest problem I see is a bloated administration. As is the case with most large organizations, power gravitates towards the top. The admin at the top get overwhelmed with responsibility and end up hiring more admin beneath them to handle things, but the power just gravitates back towards the top and the cycle continues until you have a highly-bureaucratic, admin-heavy organization. The salaries for all those admin has to come from somewhere.
Meanwhile, teachers are treated as warm bodies to fill positions. Their performance is evaluated by admin who have little-to-no actual education experience, so grade inflation and brown-nosing are the most effective ways to keep a teaching position. This ensures the school keeps wasting money on bad teachers while the bloated admin retains support from the rest of the organization.
Many teachers get shuffled around from school-to-school, and in some cases subject-to-subject, so they are constantly adjusting instead of refining their craft. Admin's solution to this is to take the burden of course development away from teachers by purchasing bundles of course materials/frameworks from third parties and pushing (sometimes requiring) teachers to teach according to them. So much of the material ends up being useless that teachers end up having to spend just as much time/effort anyways adjusting the material and sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Going into a little more specifics, my wife works with special needs children at a high school level. This is getting especially frustrating because admin and other non-education staff lazily put any kids who misbehave or just don't do their work on special development plans. These plans involve a lot of costly bureaucracy and are very difficult to get rid of once created. Meanwhile, my wife has to put less and less of her attention on kids who legitimately need the extra help as an increasing portion of the student body gets put on these plans.
Naturally, many of the kids don't like getting put on special development plans and separated from their peers. Admin's solution is to abandon self-contained classes for kids with special needs in favor of co-taught classes where two or more teachers manage an oversized class of mixed-needs students. This results in classes which are less effective for both groups of students while costing more as teachers now have to spend extra time and effort on coordination.
These are just examples that are fresh in my mind based on recently discussions with my wife. Unfortunately, a lot of this isn't made evident by budgets.
> These are just examples that are fresh in my mind based on recently discussions with my wife. Unfortunately, a lot of this isn't made evident by budgets.
I urge you to look at your district's budget in detail. Many of them do in fact break out administrative staff costs separately from teaching staff costs. Decades of frustration on the part of the electorate has forced them to in some cases. You might have to dig for it, but its in there. I don't doubt your wife's experience with an overbearing administration, but one person's lived experience does not count for your whole district, let alone the entire nation. You have to examine the data.
My wife's district's budget includes "Instruction" as one opaque budget item which accounts for 47.9% of the 2020 budget (up from 46.3% in 2017). Admin accounts for 9.6% (up from 8.3%). There is also a vague "Non-Instructional Expenditures" category which accounts for 5.1% (up from 4.6%). Almost everything else is operation/maintenance, transportation, construction, and debt service.
Less than half of the district's budget goes to "instruction" and who knows how much of that budget item really ends up being spent usefully. The "instruction" budget item did increase as a portion of the budget, but budget items specifically labeled as "admin" increased disproportionately by nearly 5x as much. "Non-Instructional Expenditures" also increased disproportionately by nearly 3x as much.
Comparing to your district, yours spends much more on instruction and much less proportionally on construction and debt services. Your district's budget is also much more granular, splitting out categories like utilities, printing, safety, and IT, plus a breakdown of your instruction budget.
I'd link to my wife's district's budget but like I said, I don't think it's wise to name my wife's employer as I'm complaining about them publicly.
This happens doubly so for some Universities. If you take a look at some of the more expensive ones w/ small endowments most of them are broke because of huge bureaucracies.
I wonder if there's a principal in here somewhere,
something like an optimal amount of middle management.
The biggest problem I see is a bloated administration. As is the case with most large organizations, power gravitates towards the top. The admin at the top get overwhelmed with responsibility and end up hiring more admin beneath them to handle things, but the power just gravitates back towards the top and the cycle continues until you have a highly-bureaucratic, admin-heavy organization. The salaries for all those admin has to come from somewhere.
Meanwhile, teachers are treated as warm bodies to fill positions. Their performance is evaluated by admin who have little-to-no actual education experience, so grade inflation and brown-nosing are the most effective ways to keep a teaching position. This ensures the school keeps wasting money on bad teachers while the bloated admin retains support from the rest of the organization.
Many teachers get shuffled around from school-to-school, and in some cases subject-to-subject, so they are constantly adjusting instead of refining their craft. Admin's solution to this is to take the burden of course development away from teachers by purchasing bundles of course materials/frameworks from third parties and pushing (sometimes requiring) teachers to teach according to them. So much of the material ends up being useless that teachers end up having to spend just as much time/effort anyways adjusting the material and sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Going into a little more specifics, my wife works with special needs children at a high school level. This is getting especially frustrating because admin and other non-education staff lazily put any kids who misbehave or just don't do their work on special development plans. These plans involve a lot of costly bureaucracy and are very difficult to get rid of once created. Meanwhile, my wife has to put less and less of her attention on kids who legitimately need the extra help as an increasing portion of the student body gets put on these plans.
Naturally, many of the kids don't like getting put on special development plans and separated from their peers. Admin's solution is to abandon self-contained classes for kids with special needs in favor of co-taught classes where two or more teachers manage an oversized class of mixed-needs students. This results in classes which are less effective for both groups of students while costing more as teachers now have to spend extra time and effort on coordination.
These are just examples that are fresh in my mind based on recently discussions with my wife. Unfortunately, a lot of this isn't made evident by budgets.