Students Strip Searched In Hunt For Missing $10 Bill

History major or not, it's an excellent response.

Question though, if we redraw school districts and make them into smaller entities, would we not end up having a series of redundant bureaucracies?

Yes and no.... The advantage of a small school district would be that there's not that much organizational management. From what I've seen, they can do a lot more with fewer people, and pretty much everybody in the administration stays close -- within a couple of levels -- to the education side of things. With huge districts, there are managers of managers of managers of people, and managers of people of managers of facilities, etc... The empire-building can get pretty severe when you have as many layers of management between decision-making and classroom.

What do we do about that?

Because of correspondingly small budgets, I think it would tend to take care of itself. Of course, there's also the state and national bureaucracy, which basically forces districts to hire extra bureaucrats. Probably the most amazing school thing I ever saw (several years ago now) was a discussion of admin overhead for the Chicago Catholic school system. They had about about half the students of the public schools, but the public admin outnumbered them 6,000(!!!) to 25 -- a factor of 170 times more.

Do you think it would be workable to have smaller school districts that share certain bureaucratic functions?

Definitely. Things like HR, IT, and various record-keeping functions. This approach works well in the business world -- it's a good way to reduce costs for operational organizations.

As to limiting the size of the schools themselves, I think that while it sounds like an excellent idea, in practice it would prove to be financially burdensome.

Very true. It's a cost vs. education trade.

Facilities cost money and I would imagine that it is more cost effective to have one larger facility then multiple smaller ones.

Which is why that's the trend. But (in my kids' district, anyway) it seems to be also the case that you get a much tighter school community, and better parent involvement with events and teachers.

The bottom line is that we know public schools can do a good job -- both because they have done so in the past; and also because a lot of them continue to do so even now.

There are plenty of problems, too -- horrible cultural conditions, low expectations, incompetent teachers, poor curricula, and far, far to much state and national bureaucracy.

Every government agency from the EPA, to the janitor at the "People's House", to every agency in every State, wants to dress like gestapos. For a time they are satisfied to stand in front of their mirrors admiring themselves, then that is not enough, can't have all that training and no reason to use it, so you have to make an excuse to use it, like they did at Waco and Ruby Ridge, and all the other goof ups the ATF and FBI has committed.

The Forest Service has to be able to shoot to kill grazing ranchers, and people that have to drive across government property to get to their homes, don't you know.

Kind of reminds me of a funny story that happened in first grade. THere was an awful smell (like dirty diapers) in the classroom. The teacher went from student to student discreetly asking if we had an "accident." After each student answered no, the teacher recruited a teacher's assistant from another class and had a "line-up." (I'm not kidding) and they "sniffed our behinds." When that produced no results, a detailed search of the classroom revealed a rotten squash which had been brought to show and tell weeks before and had fallen behind the science table.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.