If you read Imprimis from Hillsdale College, this landed in your mailbox last week. President Larry Arn writes about ‘Education as a Battleground,’ which includes that startling graph you see above.
If you were wondering where the increasing cost of public education is, you have at least part of the answer.
If you want to see the problem with American education, look at a chart illustrating the comparative growth in the number of students, teachers, and district administrators in our public schools in the period between 2000 and 2019. (See the chart below.) The number of district administrators grew by a whopping 87.6 percent during these years, far outstripping the growth in the number of students (7.6 percent) and teachers (8.7 percent).
Professor Arn uses this to frame another question: who owns the children? The natural response, the political response, and the pushback. It is a debate that rages around the country but whose roots lay in the administrative state.
Public education is an important component of the prevailing administrative system. The roots of the system are in Washington, D.C., and the tendrils reach into every town and hamlet that has a public school. These tendrils retain some measure of freedom, especially in red states where legislatures do not go along automatically. In some red states, the growth of administrators has been somewhat slower than average. But this growth has been rapid and large everywhere. In every state, the result has been to remove authority and money away from the schools where the students learn. In every state, the authority and money drained from the schools have flowed toward the bureaucracy.
The political battle over this issue is fraught with dishonesty. Any criticism of public education is immediately styled as a criticism of teachers. But as the numbers show, the public education system works to the detriment of teachers and for the benefit of bureaucrats. The teachers unions themselves, some of the largest of the public employee unions, claim to be defending teachers and children. That cannot be more than half true, given that they are defending an administrative system that has grown by leaps and bounds while the number of teachers has grown very little.
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I have said and written many times that the political contest between parents and people who make an independent living, on the one hand, and the administrative state and all its mighty forces on the other, is the key political contest of our time. Today that seems truer than ever. The lines are clearly formed.
If you look at those lines, you might be unable to believe what you see. On one side, we have adults in and out of the school system who insist that in the name of anti-discrimination, students must discriminate against one race of children as oppressors because of the past sin of human slavery – while leaving out the complicity of actual slavers who do not share their skin color.
Another example tells us that government (meaning taxpayer) funded education must allow adults to talk to young children about sex and provide them with resources that you, as a taxpayer or parent, could not read in public without being arrested.
The lines are formed, and guarding the lines on the one side is an army of bureaucrats, expanding at great expense to teachers, students, education, and America. On the other side are the people who pay them and to whom they are meant to answer.
IMPRIMIS NOVEMBER 2022 | VOLUME 51, ISSUE 11
