Ramon Cortines the current Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified school district is now demanding a 2% pay cut this year and a 10% cut next year. Most of the cuts will come from the classroom and the teacher side of the budget. It is easier to replace a teacher position that has been cut than to put back administrative positions that have been eliminated.
The following is an article that Harriet Perl and I wrote in March of 1990. Unbelievably the situation in the Los Angeles Unified School District is worse today than it was then! Class size has been increased and there are more administrators, many more administrators!
LET’S HAVE REAL REFORM—MARCH 1990
Despite a great deal of talk about reform, education remains a bulwark of autocratic stagnation, with kids and teachers still last in line for the money, still getting what is left over after the bureaucracy takes the lions share of the budget. A few weeks ago I received a copy of the “88-89” LAUSD budget audit. As I read the document, I began to realize the upside down budget priority system of the LAUSD. It is a priority system that feeds the bureaucrats and the bureaucracy and starves the educational needs of school children. What is happening in Los Angeles with our school districts budget is happening in many other districts in this state. In fact some smaller districts have even more waste than L.A., Pomona, Long Beach, Azusa, and Beverly Hills just to name a few. These districts have a higher administrator-teacher ratio than the 1 to 11.6 in Los Angeles. The incredibly small percentage of the budget that is actually spent on the students’ education is the truly appalling aspect of the L.A. District’s budget. There is no question that the main function of a school is to educate kids. So, if the 60% of the kids that stay in school and graduate can’t read and write beyond the eighth grade level and can’t compute a two-step math problem, then all the money that taxpayers spend on the schools is wasted. The schools are unquestionably not fulfilling their function. Why?
For years now as test scores dropped, it was we teachers that were blamed. We were the obvious ‘fall guy” for the failure of public education. No one pushed that idea more than administrators. If the heat was on us, then it wouldn’t be where it should be, on them. Administrators had a double problem: make the educational system look better to the taxpayers and maintain their own cushy positions. Telling the public that teachers were at fault solved their problems perfectly. In the 70’s and 80’s the legislature decided to pass “reform” legislation to evaluate teachers every other year, the Stull Bill. The legislature also passed the CBEST, a test all prospective teachers had to pass. The result of these “get the teacher” reforms was that nothing changed. Test scores continued to go down, obviously proving that teachers are not the problem. In fact, teachers are the strength of the system. Teachers hold the systems together and make them work as well as they do. A study of the districts budgets in the 1980’s tells a terrible story of mismanagement and waste. (The last nineteen years have seen no change). Any business will tell you that management should never receive more than 15% of the budget. LAUSD Administrators annually consume more than 30% of the budget. In 1988-89 the LAUSD budget was $3.5 billion. Last year (1988-89) the 33,000 teachers earned an average salary of $35,000 (including benefits), that comes to$1,245,000,000. Add the $83,766,000 spent on text books and supplies for students. You then realize that only 35% of the budget is spent directly on the classroom. The district’s administrators received 25% of the entire $3.5 billion budget, $976,700,000. That figure does not include the cost of school site administrators. Any business that only spends 35% of its budget on the product (in our case, students’ education) would be out of business or creating a lousy product. It is almost impossible for a bureaucracy to reform themselves. It will take legislation to do the job. One absurd California law that must be changed is the one that allows districts to have one administrator for every 12 teachers. There should be a law that requires districts to budget 75% for supplies and personnel that work directly with children. Teachers are the real educational experts, not administrative bureaucrats that “escaped” the classroom as fast as they could for higher pay and less work. You want real reform, ask an experienced teacher. They will tell you what to do and how to do it. The problem is nobody ever asks!
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