How Bureaucracy Effects Effective Education

Common Good reported the following statistics:

• 88% of superintendents say that keeping up with all the government (local, state, and federal) mandates takes up too much time.
• 54% of superintendents and 48% of principals say they “must work around the system” to “get things done the way they want.”
• 81% of superintendents and 47% of principals and say that when talented superintendents or principals leave, the departure was most likely due to frustration with politics and bureaucracy
• 24% of superintendents and 32% of principals say they have “enough autonomy to ‘reward outstanding teachers and staff.'”
• 28% of superintendents and 32% of principals say they have sufficient authority to remove “ineffective teachers from the classroom.”
• 56% of teachers agree “the tenure system should be changed to make it far easier to remove bad teachers.”
• In the Grossmont Union School District, located in southern California, it took 13 years and $312,000 in legal costs to remove one teacher for incompetence.
• In the entire state of Florida in 1997, 0.05% of teachers were removed involuntarily from their jobs.  In the entire state’s economy in the same year, 7.9% of all employees were fired.
• In 2 Georgie counties, no tenured teacher was fired from 1995 to 2000.
• New York City public schools employ 72,000 teachers.  The school board attempted to fire 3 teachers for incompetence over 2 years.

To read additional information, click on Law and Public Education: The Paralyzing Effects of Excessive Bureaucracy.