Administrative Overload

Campus Report ^ | October 1, 2009 | Allie Winegar Duzett

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Administrative Overload

by: Allie Winegar Duzett, October 01, 2009

William Ouchi, Eric Nadelstern, and Chester E. Finn, Jr. were the panelists at an American Enterprise Institute event on September 23, 2009. The event, entitled Total Student Load: The Secret to Boosting School Performance?, and William Ouchi’s recent book, The Secret of TSL, both pose solutions to the challenges currently faced by the nation’s public school systems.

To William Ouchi, the first speaker, the answer lies in what he terms “TSL,” or “Total Student Load.” This term refers to the number of students each teacher must know and interact with.

Ouchi went on to claim that merely lowering TSL is not enough: decentralization of school districts is also key. He found in his research that when principals—instead of centralized school districts—are given control over school budgets, school achievement increases. Uniformly, principals who were given more control over their school budgets did two things, even without direction to do so: they eliminated non-teaching positions from the schools and they lowered TSL. As Accuracy in Academia has reported, more than a third of public school employees nationwide are not teachers. Ouchi pointed out that in a typical public school, each teacher has a TSL of around 150—and the surplus of students leads to a gross decline in real attention per student. Ouchi explained that when he was in high school, he would have to write essays 25 pages long, but today’s teachers, each teaching dozens of students, would never be able to grade assignments that intense. Decreasing TSL, Ouchi claimed, has the effect of giving teachers a limited number of students that they can get to know and support, and the smaller number of total students the teachers interact with makes grading tough assignments simpler.....