In Defense of Red Ink in our Schools

Critically Thinking about America's K-12 School System

{This commentary was primarily authored by family psychologist John Rosemond, who advises parents from a biblical worldview that has no room for psychology. In his younger days, John sang lead in a rock 'n' roll band. His websites are parentguru.com and johnrosemond.com.

I will wager that the typical reader of this piece does not know that between 2000 and 2019, inclusive, the pupil population of America’s public schools increased 7.6 %, the number of teachers increased 8.6 %, and the number of district administrators increased 87.6 %. I’ll re-do that last figure alphabetically so you’ll know it’s not a typo: eighty-seven-point-six percent! That is an eleven-fold increase over the increase in students and a ten-fold increase over the increase in teachers, whose numbers grew commensurate with the uptick in pupil population (as they should).

                In other words, most, by far, of a school system’s per-pupil expenditures are not going into the classroom. Instead they are supporting administrative positions that parochial and other private schools largely do without and yet manage, overall, to remain up and running and provide an education that is comparable if not superior to public education.

               Public school administration is a money pit. When do public schools have enough administrators? When a private school head is asked, “Do you have enough administrators?” the answer is either “yes” or “no, but we manage.” The mere fact that a private school stays open means they have satisfied their administrative requirements. An administrative enlargement of 87.6 percent over twenty years means public schools never satisfy their perpetual hunger for money, most of which goes into positions that have been invented for no rational reason having to do with teaching the ABCs.

            What do these administrators do, anyway? By and large, they have nothing to do with teaching children to read, write, do basic math or critically think. Many if not most of them deal with postmodern philosophical issues like making sure children who identify as biological absurdities of one kind or another do not suffer discrimination. Many of the administrators in question ensure that the systems they oversee are compliant with the many rules and regulations generated at the Department of Education in Washington, DC, where toil (if that’s the word) some of the worst decision-makers on the planet.

The glaring disparity between the slight uptick in students and classroom teachers, and the inexplicable increase in administrators, has failed to slow the fifty-plus year downturn in student achievement. This began a few decades ago when America’s education elite decided that schools were an ideal petri dish for cultivating and spreading a leftist/socialist worldview.

                I am a member of the last generation of American children who attended neighborhood schools that focused almost exclusively on teaching academics. It is significant to note that our teachers used a good amount of red ink. We could actually be wrong, and when we were, the punches were not pulled and the red ink spilled. Yet, our mental health, even when adjusted for reporting error, is estimated to have been ten times better than the mental health of today’s kids, whose teachers have been told that above all else, they are to protect student self-esteem and to facilitate talk about feelings.

            Embarrassingly, 65% of our fourth-grade students read below proficiency. Worse, 66% of eighth-grade public school students in the USA read below the level of proficiency, which means that nothing much of value is taking place between fourth and eighth grade in the typical public school.

            Even more disconcerting is that the number of our high school graduates who have the ability and interest in Critical Thinking, is dropping precipitously. This inverse correlation with the rise in administrators is not a fluke, but an expected result. The primary message to our students today is to lemming-like follow whatever is politically in vogue.

Bottom line: Public schools don’t need more administrators — they need more red ink.

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Here are other materials by physicist John Droz that you might find interesting:

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not, on issues from: COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2022 Archives. Send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name, and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time — but why would you?)

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