I don't know what is happening in your district, but there is not much bureaucracy in ours. In fact there is so little bureaucracy that our vice principals in charge of discipline are overwhelmed, and rarely have time to deal with anything else. Our department chairs are supposed to be picking up the slack, in terms of administration, but because they already have full time jobs teaching, the administration just isn't getting done. We have no support for new teachers in the high schools (nor are we likely to get any), there is no coordination regarding who is teaching what, or where the class sets of books are. I submitted a detailed proposal suggesting we get software to manage some of the load, but everyone is so overwhelmed no one wants to support any new proposal for fear it will mean an extra full time job. And they're right to be afraid of that.
Administration was cut to the bone about 10 years ago in our district, especially at the high school level. The cuts were never restored, and now we are expected to make more. We're cutting lean meat now.
There is a lot of talk about the administrative load, but I haven't seen it. In districts in our area teachers and other certificated workers (reading specialists, resource teachers, etc) account for 70%+ of the budget.
In our district we are so cash strapped we may have to reverse our class size reductions. That will be sad. It's made a huge difference to have 20 students per class in k-3. |
