I wasn't alive back then, and I admit I've not studied much on what the schools really were like. But, I picture a one-room building with one teacher for all the students in it.
No principle. No janitor. No bus driver. No lunch cook. Just the students and their teacher.
Of course, that would be a school on the frontier. I imagine in 1850, a school in Boston might have offered a few more classes per building. The big cities might have even had school principles. Or, did they call them school masters, or head masters?
The point I would like to make, is that we've added a lot of administration since those days when it was just the school marm and the kids. I believe that now almost half a school's budget goes toward administration.
Should some of that be cut? Should we be laying off administrators? We probably need bus drivers, and school cooks, and janitors, but . . .
How about those guys at the top?
As I write, I search the Internet, and find in an npr.org article by John O'Connor about Florida's education.
"There is no bigger target for school criticism than what disticts spend on administrative staff and other overhead," O'Connor writes. "Joe Taxpayer wants to cry 'waste!' when he sees a bunch of bureaucrats bringing down six figures at his expense."
Well, I confess, I think back to my days in high school, and wonder if the school really would have been reduced to chaos if Mr. Maughn had not been there as principal. What if we just cut him out?
Just wondering. Just wondering.
We need them, but at a lower salary
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