Declining education quality: too many admin staff and asst. principals

[Anonymous]

I'm in dark blue Illinois and it's the same thing here.
I'm looking at the directory for the elementary school down the street and there is a ridiculous amount of non-teaching staff.
Two principals and two assistant principals,each with their own secretary, four reading "instructional coaches" and three math instructional coaches plus a huge array of people who maybe actually work with children sometimes I will give them all the benefit of the doubt.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Feel free to blame your Republican governor for this! Elon Musk is not American and did not grow up in the US and has absolutely ZERO experience with the US educational system. He seems to think the USDOE runs things, but no ladies, it is mostly done at the state and local level.

Wait you think Youngkin did this? VDOE is not setting the number of admin in FCPS schools and at Gatehouse. You could maybe argue that some of the burden admin are supposed to be picking up (the measurment and data collection) comes from VDOE, I guess? But really, this was accelerating long before 2021.

I agree. This has little to do with local govt.

My thoughts? Teaching has gotten ridiculously challenging and many people are looking for a way out. Admin is the easy answer. So people apply for admin, and once they get the job they create additional positions to pull others out of the classroom. Then they end up needing to justify all these positions, and so we get the pointless initiatives. And who gets to deal with it? The teachers who didn’t take the opportunity to jump to admin.

So admin creates work and teachers do it. When I started teaching, I had 4 administrators. Now I have 11. Our school population has decreased.

A ton of teachers sneak out of the classroom in ways other than leaving the profession. They dip into coach, resource teacher, and ESOL positions which usually has less ratios and documentation, as well as administrative and central office jobs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Feel free to blame your Republican governor for this! Elon Musk is not American and did not grow up in the US and has absolutely ZERO experience with the US educational system. He seems to think the USDOE runs things, but no ladies, it is mostly done at the state and local level.

Wait you think Youngkin did this? VDOE is not setting the number of admin in FCPS schools and at Gatehouse. You could maybe argue that some of the burden admin are supposed to be picking up (the measurment and data collection) comes from VDOE, I guess? But really, this was accelerating long before 2021.

I agree. This has little to do with local govt.

My thoughts? Teaching has gotten ridiculously challenging and many people are looking for a way out. Admin is the easy answer. So people apply for admin, and once they get the job they create additional positions to pull others out of the classroom. Then they end up needing to justify all these positions, and so we get the pointless initiatives. And who gets to deal with it? The teachers who didn’t take the opportunity to jump to admin.

So admin creates work and teachers do it. When I started teaching, I had 4 administrators. Now I have 11. Our school population has decreased.

A ton of teachers sneak out of the classroom in ways other than leaving the profession. They dip into coach, resource teacher, and ESOL positions which usually has less ratios and documentation, as well as administrative and central office jobs.

It's fewer, not less. I'm an ESOL teacher with anywhere from 50-70 kids on my caseload. It's a ton of paperwork and testing. I teach FT and do all of that too. Yes, my groups are smaller but they are the lowest performing students in each grade. Most classroom teachers don't want that.

[Anonymous]

They need a DOGE for all the state education departments and local school districts. Maybe Elon should make a rule at the federal level that in order to get money passed down, at least x% of their budgets need to be spent in the classroom on actual teacher salaries rather than admin salaries or special programs.

[Anonymous]

Federal initiatives (often unfunded mandates) expanded requiring more state personnel which then requires more local admin to administer these initiatives and reports.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

At my current school, there are too many admin, and each of them is scurrying to show that their post is relevant. In my school, high school teachers share a common calendar and work together to ensure that students don't have major assessments on the same day or near the same day when possible. None of the members of our bloated admin staff have the same consideration for teachers as they all rush to create new "initiatives" and processes and meetings.

This right here. My small Title I ES has 2 admin and 4 nebulous facilitators who do not work with students and are instead supposed to be supporting teachers in improving their practice. What it really means is those 6 people spend an awful lot of time making tasks for us to do in meeting after meeting without ever working with students or in a classroom so they can see just how desperately our kids need more effective help. Their suggestions are great in theory but not in practice and most of them do not have proven experience improving a school like ours. My “planning time” is spent doing tasks they make them look and feel good without actually helping accelerate the growth of my students who are YEARS below grade level.

+1000

And these are the people who are in charge of "assessing" teachers.

20 years ago, I had so much more time to actually read and produce meaningful feedback on my high school English students' writing. All that planning time has been jerked away from me, to the point that it now takes me weeks to get papers back, and my feedback is often rushed and not as useful. Admin don't care! They are happy that I am attending so many meetings, and that I am doing so many stupid tasks that have nothing to do with actually teaching or planning or grading, because they don't understand what teaching actually entails.

I am the one who mentioned the stupid Monday morning before-school meeting about "team building" for teachers. Let me tell you what this meeting entails. Last Monday, I arrived early before school and hurried to the designated meeting room. First we stood around a big table heaped with Christmas cookies and grapes for ten minutes; everyone was to tired and annoyed to actually eat anything. Some of us chatted about all the things we had to do that we wished we were allowed to actually do instead of this. Then, we were put into pairs and given some strips of paper to draw and read at our partner. Mine directed me to ask my partner, a teacher I work with every day, what her favorite song is and why. Then she asked me what color I would be if I were a color, and why. Then a pointless, cheery pep talk from an admin about how we are all rockstars and he knows it will be a busy week but we can do it! Then we all rushed, stressed and thinking about the long week ahead, to our classrooms for homeroom.

As a parent this makes me livid for you and for the kids. We've moved from public to a private that doesn't have much in the way of admin or initiatives (the decline of public education was part of why and I was aware that this was a piece of the issue from reading various threads over in the FCPS forum for years) and the teachers actually have time to be invested!

That is great, but your “solution” of private school doesn’t help the world, only your kids and you.

We need people to have kids in our society and in order to do that, free public education must work. If you believe private is the answer, you will just bring down the birth rate (which is already low) due to increasing child raising costs.

From a societal perspective, it would be better to have parents like you advocate for strong public schools even if you are out of the system. I wonder if you do that. Voting with your feet doesn’t help in this situation. You can choose private, but still show up at school board meetings to improve public schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They need a DOGE for all the state education departments and local school districts. Maybe Elon should make a rule at the federal level that in order to get money passed down, at least x% of their budgets need to be spent in the classroom on actual teacher salaries rather than admin salaries or special programs.

He would cut all the wrong things and go to virtual on a computer made by X, stocked with software made my X.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is an eye-opener !

I had some idea our local FCPS Administration was way over-staffed and has become a dumping ground for failed principals. But I had little idea how massive the the wasted $$ problem really is:

Wow!

I'm a teacher and am very nervous about possible cutbacks in the government and education, but this post is spot on.
School districts are absolutely bloated with admin positions which do nothing but create more useless work for teachers. This would be a great area to put on the chopping block.

[Anonymous]

Even in red states, teacher’s & educational staff tend to be be big-government progressives who support DEI & other wasteful fads. Meanwhile, students’ can’t think, write, or do math.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, for FCPS in particular, they aren't really overstaffed. The problem lies with some of the progressive education reform changes and with the students (or parents). We parents have done a fair bit of wrecking schools, much more than too many administrative staff.

Teacher here - not FCPS. The problem is with both too many admin and nonsensical idealogy (lack of discipline and consequences the biggest).

[Anonymous]

Sorry for errant apostrophes…typing in hurry^^

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is an eye-opener !

I had some idea our local FCPS Administration was way over-staffed and has become a dumping ground for failed principals. But I had little idea how massive the the wasted $$ problem really is:

Wow!

I'm a teacher and am very nervous about possible cutbacks in the government and education, but this post is spot on.
School districts are absolutely bloated with admin positions which do nothing but create more useless work for teachers. This would be a great area to put on the chopping block.

If 50% of FCPS Gatehouse staff were laid off, teachers would have less “overhead” to get in the way of actual teaching. As a bonus, there would be more budget available for raises for actual instructional staff. That said, it will not happen with the current Fairfax County school board.

And, until one of the political parties changes how it creates candidates for school board, it will continue. Both parties put forward silly candidates, so there is no clear “sensible” candidate to vote for — assuming enough of Fairfax stopped voting the party line…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They need a DOGE for all the state education departments and local school districts. Maybe Elon should make a rule at the federal level that in order to get money passed down, at least x% of their budgets need to be spent in the classroom on actual teacher salaries rather than admin salaries or special programs.

He would cut all the wrong things and go to virtual on a computer made by X, stocked with software made my X.

Well his tweet was rather encouraging. It looks like he knows where the problem is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is an eye-opener !

I had some idea our local FCPS Administration was way over-staffed and has become a dumping ground for failed principals. But I had little idea how massive the the wasted $$ problem really is:

Wow!

I'm a teacher and am very nervous about possible cutbacks in the government and education, but this post is spot on.
School districts are absolutely bloated with admin positions which do nothing but create more useless work for teachers. This would be a great area to put on the chopping block.

If 50% of FCPS Gatehouse staff were laid off, teachers would have less “overhead” to get in the way of actual teaching. As a bonus, there would be more budget available for raises for actual instructional staff. That said, it will not happen with the current Fairfax County school board.

And, until one of the political parties changes how it creates candidates for school board, it will continue. Both parties put forward silly candidates, so there is no clear “sensible” candidate to vote for — assuming enough of Fairfax stopped voting the party line…

But process that keeps programs running, the district in compliance, and reviews for improvement would suddenly stop being done. Do principals and teachers want to take on that work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, for FCPS in particular, they aren't really overstaffed. The problem lies with some of the progressive education reform changes and with the students (or parents). We parents have done a fair bit of wrecking schools, much more than too many administrative staff.

Teacher here - not FCPS. The problem is with both too many admin and nonsensical idealogy (lack of discipline and consequences the biggest).

Agree that FCPS has too many admin/non-instructional staff, and too much ideology, not enough leadership focus on actual teaching and student learning.