My son got an email from his college a couple of years ago outlining new job openings on the UC Santa Cruz campus. We were in the car when it came it, and he pulled it up and asked me:
“Dad, do we really need an interim assistant vice-provost?”
Well, probably not.
One of the reasons that the cost of higher education has soared so much in the past two decades is the enormous cost of bloated administration.
But it’s not just at colleges. As the San Francisco Unified School District looks at laying off 151 faculty, and as three new members join the School Board, some teachers and board members are saying that the money going to the classroom as been declining while the money going to administration keeps soaring.
Obviously, this is an awful debate from the start: The state has a $40 billion surplus, and at least half of that should go, right now, to rebuilding public education.
But check out this chart that community opponents of the cuts have prepared:
A decade ago, there were 24 people at SFUSD with the title of “director” or “executive director.” Today, while the number of students has barely risen, there are 76. They all make salaries that are more than double what most teachers make.
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There are 12 “chiefs,” who make as much as three teachers.
School Board member Matt Alexander told me he’s been trying to figure out what they all do—and it’s still a mystery. “I’ve only recently even gotten a full org chart,” he said
What they don’t do is teach classes.
San Francisco has, he told me, the largest top management of any district in California, except for LA, which has about ten times as many students as SF. And the district’s plan for cuts impacts the classroom more than the administration:
Long Beach Unified, which has a demographic mix similar to SF and has stronger achievement levels for Latinx and Black students, also has fewer than half the number of administrators as SFUSD, and spends a much larger percentage of its budget on classroom instruction.
We’re talking about a difference of $100 million. That would be enough not only to avoid any classroom teacher layoffs but to expand the number of teachers and what they are paid substantially.
San Francisco has a lot more people in the field of Student and Family Services, which is probably a good thing and something the district needs. But overall, Alexander told me, there are a lot of people in the central office whose jobs are less critical than those of the frontline teachers.
The people who organized the recall of three School Board members were upset about school closures during Covid, the energy and money spent on renaming schools (to be fair, a tiny, tiny fraction of what’s spend on administration) and the admissions policy at Lowell.
But now that we have a new board, with a leadership and majority controlled by the mayor, maybe the people in charge of the schools can look seriously at how much money is going to teaching and how much is going to an interim assistant vice provost.
