When Brian Kisida, Jonathan Mills, and I released our study of administrative bloat in higher education through the Goldwater Institute, we thought it was bad that universities had increased their hiring of administrators (professional staff who are not faculty) at twice the rate of faculty.
I now realize that the perpetrators of waste in higher ed are mere amateurs. The administrative bloat pros can be found in K-12 education. According to a new report from the Friedman Foundation released today, student enrollment has increased 96% since 1950, but the growth in “administrators and other non-teaching staff [was] a staggering 702 percent.”
The report provides results state by state, highlighting the growth in staffing in recent years. Even in the few states where enrollment has declined, staffing levels have grown dramatically. Check it out.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
No comments yet? How sad. Here is a core problem with education funding and no one responds! This is what I’ve been trying to tell you all for the 1-2 years I’ve posted here. The problem is the managers NOT the worker-bees. Their numbers are huge and they contribute NOTHING to the students. They are the FAT in the budgets. THEY make the high salaries and have thier friends in the bureauracy help them spike their pensions. They are like the bureaucrats in the Kremlim who make their 5 year plans in their sterile offices and force them on the workers in the classroom. Then they use YOUR frustration with their failures to turn you against teachers. Hey-I know the teachers’ union put targets on their own backs by defending bad teachers and being sooooooooooo partisan. But Republicans would gain teacher votes if they made it a point to attack bloated school district bureaucracies like Chris Christie has attacked Superintendent salaries.
Watch the upcoming fight in the Los Angeles district. It’s all about who know how to teach – the bureaucrats or the teachers.
AND can we get a study on the growth of Education Department employees. They are theultimate wh—s of the system.
Joe-
Randi W. and her Broader/Bolder crowd want to put dentists and lawyers in schools. In other words, they want to move the nob to 11 on administrative bloat and to do the opposite of concentrating resources on highly effective instructors:
https://jaypgreene.com/2008/08/06/aft-goes-up-in-smoke/
I agree that reformers like Christie should put more emphasis on this, but isn’t it the case that it is happening with either the active support and/or enabling indifference of the unions who claim to be looking after the interests of teachers?