Central Office Admin Bloat Is a Real Problem

We've got too many central office administrators who are too disconnected from what's going on in classrooms.

I don't know if you've seen this graph making the rounds, but the number of central office administrators, depending on how they classify people in this graph, has gone up about 88% in the last two decades.

I mean, that is a lot considering that teachers relative to students have not gone up at all.

We've kept the same ratio of students and teachers, But administrators at the central office have gone up 88% and school administrators have gone up 37%.

Now that school administrator number makes sense to me because most school administrators are stretched too thin.

So I think we needed to go up a little bit there.

But I don't think most educators would agree that central offices were understaffed.

So I have to ask, what are we doing?

And in answer to that question, I think we have to consider the possibility that central office administrators are mostly making up things for teachers to do.

And sometimes that comes in the form of, quote unquote, data driven work.

best practices.

Sometimes when we hear phrases like data-driven, we forget to ask, as opposed to what?

Data-driven, as opposed to what?

And I think the alternative that we should really be looking seriously at is first-hand experience in the classroom.

as a central office administrator, if you are making a data-driven decision, are you also getting into classrooms, talking with teachers, seeing how things are going, getting a sense of how things are on the ground, or are you just looking at data?

Because data is very one-dimensional, right?

And nowhere is this more obvious and more problematic than with discipline reform, right?

If you say, well, we need to get our suspension rate down, how can we get our suspension rate down?

Well, a really easy way to get your suspension rate down if you're a district administrator is to ban suspension and say, well, we'll just get the suspension rate down by a rule, no more suspensions.

And you might think that that's going great if all you're looking at is data.

But if you're getting into classrooms and talking with teachers and realizing, oh, those behaviors are still happening, we're just not dealing with them.

Those behaviors are still affecting learning.

And in fact, they're affecting learning more than ever because we're not dealing with them.

And all we have to show for it is a lower number on a graph in terms of suspensions.

Like we have to actually see how things are working out for teachers and students in the classroom.

And I think the bloat that we're seeing in central office bureaucracies these days is a real problem if the main function of those people is not to listen to teachers and meet their needs, but to give them more work to do and to give them policies that maybe look good on paper, but don't actually work in the classroom.

The bottom line has to be learning.

The bottom line has to be, are we moving the needle for students in ways that ring true when we get into classrooms and see what's going on?

Because the unintended consequences of all the stuff that central office administrators do to make the numbers look good can be really catastrophic.

We have to be in classrooms.

If you are a central office administrator, you've got to get into classrooms.

Get into classrooms with principals.

You know, for the most part, I think that's typically the way it's done.

and get your principals to go into classrooms, because I think the double whammy here is when central office administrators don't know what teachers are dealing with, and they make decisions that affect teachers, and they make principals go along with and enforce those decisions, and the principals don't know what's going on in classrooms, and everybody who's not a teacher thinks they know what's going on because they're data-driven, they're looking at data, but they don't see the firsthand reality.

So we've got to start listening to teachers, We've got to deal with this admin bloat, especially at the central office.

And we've got to stop being just data-driven and also look at the reality in classrooms.

Let me know what you think.