Inefficiency, duplication at the core of school expense

The average cost for an administrator of elementary and secondary schools in Ohio is $91,030. Those salaries cost taxpayers of this state $824 million each year, according to researchers at Underwood & Associates of Columbus.

The Brookings Institution has studied Ohio’s economy and concluded, among many recommendations for restoring Ohio’s prosperity, that this state must shift spending from school administrators to classrooms. It recommends 1) transparency regarding costs of districts’ administrations; 2) pushing districts to share services; 3) the mandating of administrative procedures; and 4) cutting the number of Ohio’s school districts by at least one-third.

I’ve been writing about it for many months and other writers had been preaching similarly long before me. “Recognizing that ‘local’ school districts are no longer local is the first step in a real fix for Ohio’s broken system, I wrote 5/11/10 at this link.

The essay advanced four ideas that I believe would save millions.

1 - Combine at the state level all administrative functions that do not directly involve individual school buildings. Top local school administrators should be building principals.

2 - Combine at the state level purchasing of supplies and provision of services such as busing. Services and supplies could be provided by private companies, selected by lowest and best bids.

3 - Pay school employees throughout Ohio the same, with variance according to the cost of living in each community.

4 - Remove state interference from the art and science of teaching. Let teachers take over that responsibility in full, but provide for ways to weed out incompetent teachers and financially reward the better ones according to a statewide measure. All schools would teach the same classroom subjects and offer the same extra-curriculars, as mandated by a commission of a-political persons with demonstrated expertise in education.

School administrators, under the present system, all do essentially the same jobs, each in their own little neighborhoods. It makes the state system a massive and inefficient conglomerate of disparate parts supposedly doing the same job. There is no reward for efficiency or cost containment. Run out of money? Bribe, threaten, and sweet-talk property owners for more taxes.

Oversight of Ohio’s public schools presently is a political process, guided not by management skill, not by educators, but by people skilled at getting elected to office. Meanwhile teacher/staff/administrator labor unions guide this “oversight” from the shadows. Never mind that all schools of Ohio should be doing the same thing for the same purpose, which is bringing students to a certain level of knowledge over a 12-year period.

I am not optimistic, Brookings Institution notwithstanding. To run Ohio’s schools with a modicum of business sense will require citizens to finally out-muscle the labor unions, a factor so far kept secret by the state’s education reporters.