MY TURN: The hidden cost of state and federal administration on our public schools

I hope that I speak for a large percentage of our local citizens when I say that our community supports excellent educational opportunities for our children, safe and secure school buildings and competitive pay and benefits for our teachers. I also hope that all of us agree and acknowledge the important role that our local schools play in the lives of our families, and are willing to pay whatever it takes to achieve those goals.

There is, however, a large and growing hidden cost in our educational structure — non-teaching district administrators. According to statistics published by the Center for Educational Statistics and the U.S. Department of Education, the number of district administrators in U.S. public schools has grown 87.6% between 2000 and 2019 compared to student growth over that same 20-year period of only 7.6% and teacher growth of over 8.7%. That represents tenfold increase in non-teaching administrative staff as compared to the increases of student population and the teachers that do the actual educational work in our schools.

This dramatic growth in non-teaching administrators — many of whom spend their time ensuring that state and federal rules and regulations are followed and met — vividly illustrates the impact of the growing administrative burden that our local school districts must monitor, meet and report on to other administrators at the state and federal levels.

The cost of that administrative burden is much more than the actual dollars spent on administration, although that cost is extreme since a large percentage of these administrators earn considerably more than we pay our teachers. The rise in the number of administrators required to meet state and federal regulations and reporting requirements removes a significant amount of authority and funding away from teachers and the operation of our schools — where our students learn — and moves it toward the state and federal educational bureaucracy.

The data also doesn’t capture the growing administrative burden on existing teaching staff. These burdens represent real costs in terms of teacher time, diminished instructional capacity and endemic burnout in the teaching profession. Special education teachers, for instance, spend more time each week on administrative paperwork than they do on assessing student progress, communicating with parents, sharing expertise with colleagues, supervising paraprofessionals and attending Individualized Education Plan meetings combined.

Is there any wonder that many of our local school districts have had to defer spending on facility maintenance, when they have had to expand non-teaching staff tenfold over the past two decades to simply deal with all of the increasing administrative and reporting burdens imposed on them by state and federal regulations?

We can and should address this problem, and it starts at the local level. First, understand the administrative burden our local schools are dealing with, and what it is costing to deal with that burden. Talk to teachers and our local principals and superintendents to get their advice on how we can reduce that burden.

Second, lobby our state legislators to review the administrative reports and requirements imposed by our State Department of Education and look for opportunities to reduce or streamline those.

Third, make your representatives in Congress aware of the financial impact that federal administrative rules and regulations are having on our local schools and ask them seek opportunities to reduce those.

The dollars spent by our schools on meeting excessive administrative regulations and reports are your tax dollars and a lot more of them should be spent on improving instruction, expanding educational opportunities and addressing facility maintenance at the local level.

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Len Crosby is a Post Falls resident.