"If you cut the central office down to two people, it would still be one too many." This is a common sentiment in education circles, at least among people who don't work in central offices. It is probably even more common among people who don't work in education. There's no getting around it: central offices in school districts are among the most unpopular—and least understood—of all the functions in municipal government.
Central offices are also favorite political targets. Former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett probably had his most quoted moment when he described the giant administrative blob besetting America's public schools. New York's Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani recently responded to a report on his city's schools by vowing to "crush the administrative structure," as if this were the one obstacle between troubled and effective schools.
Some of this antipathy is understandable. Cuts in education funding are always felt the hardest in the classrooms. People ask, "Why not take it out of central instead?" Any dollar spent on noninstructional costs becomes suspect. Forgotten is the fact that many of these expenditures are necessary for conducting teaching and learning activities and for employing people to carry them out.
A few years ago a widely quoted figure made the national rounds claiming that only 65 percent of school budgets was spent in classrooms. The rest was said to be eaten up by the bureaucracy. What this assertion failed to make clear was that the central offices paid the utility bills, employee fringe benefits, transportation, unemployment, workers' compensation, inservice training, and so forth. Glen Robinson of Educational Research Service notes that according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, school administrators supervise twice as many employees as their counterparts in manufacturing, and four times as many as other, noneducational public administrators. Despite these numbers, the perception still prevails that education is uniquely top-heavy.
Ironically, the development of central offices in education largely resulted from a demand for greater efficiency, and for more fairness. Administrative functions have been centralized to reduce redundancy, while mandated services have been seen, since the passage of the first civil rights legislation in the 1950s, as best managed by those with a vision of a system as a whole rather than one that could be co-opted by local political or personal influences. Both of these concerns—for cost-effectiveness and for broad-based equity—are just as important now as they have ever been.
We also need to remember that central offices do more than just ensure cost-effectiveness or political correctness. A good curriculum supervisor, for example, can benefit the work of a hundred teachers, helping with new ideas, materials, and connections to other subjects and networks.
Decentralization
School districts everywhere are now wrestling with issues of decentralization and school-based management. Some, if not most, of the reasons for this trend have to do with pedagogy, not economics. Yet this trend begs the question of the role and even the viability of central offices: do we still need them, and how much do we need?
Politicians, school boards, or superintendents can temporarily appease a segment of the population by announcing cuts in the central office. Other services or functions may be moved out into schools: "Let the schools make these decisions themselves" is a popular alternative. There may be a hidden expense to these political gestures, however. Doing something in a lot of different places is not necessarily better—and rarely cheaper—than doing it in one place.
Moreover, as school-based management becomes more widely practiced, school people are becoming concerned about the demands placed upon them to perform noninstructional tasks, like paperwork connected with employment, budget management, and compliance with mandates. While control should reside as much as possible in schools, many people may not welcome the onerous chores that accompany administration. Not only are these specialized functions that sometimes require additional training, they often seem like the least rewarding functions in education.
I cannot help but wonder, as schools come to terms with issues of local management, whether sooner or later a cry will go up, as it did 40 years ago, for independent, specialized management—in central locations—to take the red-tape work out of schools so they can focus more on teaching and learning. And if it does, will we repeat the same mistakes?
The real challenge for public school districts is to take stock of their entire management approach. Communities need to be assured that all administrative functions are efficiently run and are clearly linked to the instructional mission of schools. A central office should be a true educational service center, where schools can look for leadership, cost-effective solutions, useful data, management support, and support for community values and professional standards. The orientation of "central" should be one of service, not monitoring. Its goal should be to make the jobs of people in schools smoother and more informed. Schools should not have to re-create central office in each of their buildings in order to have "user friendly" administrative help.
Schools and the communities they serve must insist on administrative services—wherever they are housed—that are collegial and responsive. At the same time, the educational leadership of every community must recognize that while bashing the central office may be politically palatable, no one can run an effective school district if every school—and eventually every classroom—becomes a system unto itself.
School districts and their communities should also become aggressive advocates for reducing the red-tape requirements imposed on them by state and federal regulations. Until we do this, we will never dispel the myth that central office is bloated and that management is costly and unwanted.
