NWA Times: Publik Skools are Big Business

The Northwest Arkansas Times ran an editorial a few weeks ago on the salaries of school superintendents.

In the 2004-05 Annual Report as published by the Fayetteville School District, Superintendent Bobby C. New headed a district that educated 8,329 students and employed roughly 1,300, with a district with a total budget of $76,805,372. Make no mistake about it — this is big business. The public education system is among the most important industries in Arkansas. By comparison, Fayetteville city government’s budget in 2006 totals roughly $120 million. The labored point we’re trying to make is that businesses with operating budgets into the millions (or billions, for that matter) demand the best CEOs available to help make sure every single i is dotted and every last t gets crossed. And, in the case of the Fayetteville School District, considering the education of thousands of young people depends directly on day-to-day decision-making, it matters a great deal who runs the show.... But, the question always arises when superintendents’ salaries become the focus: Why not cut their pay and put that money toward funding better schools? Suspicions of this sort received backup on Jan. 13, when a report by the Legislative Audit Division calculating the value of superintendents’ salaries and benefits was released. All told, $24.2 million was paid to the state’s superintendents over the course of the 2004-05 school year. Average superintendent pay in the Natural State was $96,050, while the average district size was 1,786 students. Regarding specifics, Little Rock’s Roy Brooks was the highest-paid superintendent in Arkansas during the 2004-05 school year, when he received salary and benefits totaling $232,555. Springdale’s Jim Rollins was close behind, receiving a financial package totaling $215,854. In Fayetteville, the district chose to compensate New at $198,235 for his distinguished service.... Are high salaries for superintendents inherently bad? One could always argue that smalltown superintendents deserve much less pay than their peers in bigger communities — but that doesn’t change the fact that every school board wants the best and brightest leading the educational effort for their community’s children.... The demands placed on superintendents and the performance expectations demand high salaries.... Grousing about or reducing pay for superintendents would satisfy some folks who would feel good about "sticking it to the man," so to speak. But suggesting that cuts in their pay will have any benefit for Arkansas’ education system is simply laughable, while maintaining good salaries promises to attract quality candidates when openings occur and will keep skilled administrators in place.

The Times editorial makes a lot of implicit assumptions that don't bear much looking into. Is there any reason that local education has to be "big business," organized like an "industry"? Is any inherent efficiency achieved by present degrees of centralism and hierarchy? Perhaps the problem is that education is so bureaucratic and centralized, in the first place, as to require the services of such professional administrators. Maybe it should be decentralized to the point where their services are no longer required. Maybe, as Peter Drucker put it, they're doing efficiently what shouldn't be done at all.

As I've written elsewhere, I often do a mental exercise of trying to imagine how much a frugal, small-scale schooling cooperative would cost if a group of twenty or thirty parents got together to set up a venture.

Taking into account things like renting a house for class space, and hiring teacher(s), the annual expense wouldn't be over $1500 per pupil. Existing "public" schools, on the other hand, spend upwards of $6000. Most of the difference lies in the proliferation of parasitic bureaucrats with prestige salaries, and the fact that the state's aura of majesty requires specially designed Stalinist architecture on the most expensive real estate in town.

This is a common pattern. When you try to figure out how much it would cost to organize a service for yourself, from the bottom up, and compare it to what you're paying now, it's stunning. Where does all the money go? It goes to support parasitic centralized bureaucracies with no incentive to economize. It's amazing how creative and thrifty ordinary people can be when they're spending their own money, instead of stolen loot.

Of course, the figure I came up with is only for bare bones service--extra-curricular activities and electives would be extra. But it seems to me that the cost of things like music lessons and amateur sports, in themselves, would be relatively modest. The main cost of extra-curricular activities today is the prestige aspects of organized competition with other schools. But believe it or not, there was a time when kids organized sports for themselves, and the main expense was a ball.

And considering that information is the cheapest thing in the world to move, and the proliferation of things like open-source textbooks and course notes, it's amazing that we've still got an educational model geared toward transporting people to a central "brain factory" for processing into "human resources." On second thought, it's not that amazing, considering that the original purpose of the government school system was to manufacture obedient drones for the corporate state.

As Paul Goodman described it in People or Personnel, even non-profits and cooperatives are infected with the pathologies of corporate-bureaucratic organizational culture: multiple layers of status-salared management, the "professionalization of job functions, high overhead, and corporate gobbledygook like mission statements. This hegemonic form of organization preempts alternative models of bottom-up organization:

[The] genius of our centralized bureaucracies has been..., as they interlock, to form a mutually accrediting establishment of decision-makers, with common interests and a common style....

In brief, ...the inevitability of centralism will be self-proving. A system destroys its competitors by pre-empting the means and channels, and then proves that it is the only conceivable mode of operating.

In "public" education, the roots of the problem lie in the so-called "progressive" era. The Progressive movement in this country, like Fabianism in the UK, reflected the will to power of the managerial New Class. City-wide school boards were of a piece with at-large representation, city manager governments, and other "good government" reforms at the local level.

The replacement of ward representation with at-large election resulted (in Pittsburg's 1911 "reform," for example) in transformation of a council made up of two-thirds common workmen, tradesmen, clerks and shop-keepers, into one composed entirely of "professionals" and "prominent businessmen" [Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972) p. 86]. The replacement of neighborhood control with city-wide school boards and superintendents was similarly designed to remove education from parental influence and give it over to the care of properly trained "professionals." The intergovernmental "authority," pioneered in America by the New York Port Authority and Robert Moses' Long Island highway system, like many methods of authoritarian government, was resurrected from British law and adopted near-universally as a form of "professional" government beyond the control of the electorate.

The central theme of New Class "good government" reforms was the superiority of disinterested expertise, and the need to take politics out of policy. The only way to do this was to protect professional managers from interference.

Our task today is to undo the "achievements" of the Progressive Era. The new paradigm for schools and other social services should be what Larry Gambone calls "mutualization." That is, they should be decentralized to the smallest possible unit of control, and then made directly responsible to their clientele. In the case of government schools, that means city-wide school boards should be abolished. The principal and the top management of each school should be the equivalent of a board of selectmen, directly responsible to the parents of the kids attending there. The neighborhood school, in effect, should be transformed into a consumers' co-op.