In the national debate over education, President Bush has taken the position that the U.S. spends as much as other industrialized nations -- and maybe even more. He's partly right but mostly wrong. The U.S. does spend about the same amount of money on education as other industrialized nations -- that is on elementary, secondary and higher education. However, a much higher percentage of students in the U.S. go on to college, and the costs of postsecondary education are higher here. So we spend a smaller percentage of our education budget on elementary and secondary education than these other countries.
But there is another way in which we spend less. Less of the money that is spent on elementary and secondary education actually reaches students in the form of teachers, guidance counselors and textbooks. That is because the U.S. has a larger school bureaucracy: There are many more people in district offices and offices within schools who are not directly working with children. If we could reduce the bureaucratic cost, we could go at least part of the way toward spending as much on elementary and secondary education as other industrialized nations.
The trouble is, when someone proposes that a school district cut the number of school administrators, there's usually a lot of yelling and screaming: "How can we operate the schools without all our administrators?" But a couple of months ago, the Cincinnati school district took the unusual step of drastically cutting its central office staff Its superintendent, Michael Brandt, following the suggestions of a report from Cincinnati's business community, announced that the school district would be totally reorganized and the number of administrators in the central office reduced from 127 to 62.
As a result of these and other cuts in administrative personnel, the Cincinnati school district will save $16 million over the next two years, and this money will be put back into the schools. Supporters of the cutback say that, in addition to saving money, it will make Cincinnati's school system operate more efficiently than it does now and will allow the system to take some significant steps toward improving its schools.
Cincinnati's reorganization has untangled the chain of command and gotten rid of several layers of bureaucracy. Many of the make-work rules and regulations will be gone, along with the bureaucrats who administered them. At the same time, site-based management - which is also part of the reorganization -- means that individual schools can take over their day-to-day operations instead of having to wait for directives from on high.
The Cincinnati reorganization shows how much help businesses can be to local schools when they take on an appropriate role. A commission of local leaders, headed by Clement Buenger, the retired CEO of the Fifth Third Bancorp, a local bank with a reputation for being very well managed, sat together for 18 months. Besides their expertise in organization and management, they brought their own experience of tough times -- several local corporations had had to downsize their head offices during the 1980s in order to survive. And because people perceived them as objective, they could be pretty sure their recommendations would be favorably received.
Teacher union president Tom Mooney says that teachers had been complaining about the top-heavy administration for a long time -- especially when the former superintendent responded to a financial crisis by trying to make all the cuts from teachers' jobs. But they would never have dared to ask for cuts as deep as the ones just announced "because no one would have listened to us." It took the business community report to make the point so that people would listen.
What will the school district do with the money it's going to save? The teachers' union hopes a chunk of it will go into paying for an in-school suspension program. Discipline is a major problem for many urban school systems, and Cincinnati faces it too. One or two kids who are troublemakers can create an atmosphere that makes it impossible for an entire class to learn. Putting them out on the street isn't the answer either -- for them or the community. But in-school suspension programs cost money. Now, the union hopes, the money will be available.
The people in Cincinnati know that freeing teachers and principals from the administrative quagmire in the central office is not going to remake Cincinnati's schools overnight. When people are used to waiting for orders or following rules and regulations, they don't automatically change the way they act merely because the rules are gone. In fact, they are likely to go on doing just what they've always done. It takes time and effort to learn how to come up with new ideas and to get the courage to try them out - to transform what Tom Mooney calls a "bureaucratic culture" into a "professional culture." But they are ready to try.
The people in the Cincinnati schools have made a smart trade: In exchange for administrators they did not need, they've gotten money for programs they would otherwise have been unable to afford. And they've gotten a freedom from bureaucracy they plan to put to good use. It's a trade that school districts all over the country ought to be considering.