Here's my best offer. It requires a short field trip.
Endeavoring to illustrate waste in the present system and the chief causes of the waste is logical but to quantify the waste is diificult. It is difficult because the education budget is an interactive melange of a multitude of funding sources that share one thing in common. They exist as the result of the classification of people and the ensuing attempt to benefit only that class. Beyong that they are an unorganized, overlapping, duplicitous collection of accounting nightmares and no matter the amount of charts and graphs, it will be diificult to clarify the waste to the average Freeper. A similar experience would be attempting to count the debris in the Missippippi river passing one point after a torrential rain. It would simply go on and on and on.
I would suggest a simpler comparison. Pick a school and a district, a modest sized high school near you in a modest sized district and determine the administrative cost of that school/district, in dollars. per pupil, anywhere between 1959 to 1963 as compared to 2002. The 2002 budget breakdowns, both the state's administrative share and the district's administrative share are available from the Department of Education website. Now the field trip.
Take a short trip to that same district's office and ask to see a copy of the school's budget (1959-1963). If preunification, simply ask for the budget of that particular high school. If post unification, ask for the district budget and use it instead. During the comparison, of both budgets, simply assume that federal aid carries a 10% administrative expense
Remember you'er comparing administartive costs per student, not total expenses per student. The results will probably not surprise you.
Each district sounds like it is its own little fiefdom with its own characteristics that determine how much they can grab out of the money trough.
As a side note, we have no children but do have nieces and nephews in schools, so it is not like I have an axe to grind with the districts, per se. But I also live in the Bay Area where we have as much screwed up management as anywhere in the state. It is in the news from time to time how the boards and managers just don;t handle much less count beans well.
However, being a taxpayer and getting milked just like someone with 10 kids, I want the maximum ROI for my dollar, is that too much to ask?
Thanks again for the info.