{"id":4112,"date":"2010-06-15T12:08:57","date_gmt":"2010-06-15T16:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=4112"},"modified":"2010-06-15T12:08:57","modified_gmt":"2010-06-15T16:08:57","slug":"qotd-public-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/06\/15\/qotd-public-education\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Public Education"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

As of 2006 — of course the numbers are out of date — 4,615,000 people were employed full-time by some 13,000 school districts (although if school districts used the same definition of \u201cfull-time\u201d as the rest of us the number we\u2019re talking about would be zero). Of these 4,615,000 there are 300,000 \u201cclerical and secretarial staff\u201d filling out No Child Left Behind paperwork and wondering why 64,000 \u201cofficials, administrators\u201d aren\u2019t doing it themselves, which they aren\u2019t because they\u2019re busy doing the jobs that 125,000 \u201cprincipals and assistant principals\u201d can\u2019t because they\u2019re supervising 383,000 \u201cother professional staff\u201d who are flirting with the 483,000 \u201cteachers\u2019 aides\u201d who are spilling trail mix and low-fat yogurt in the teacher\u2019s lounge making a mess for the 726,000 \u201cservice workers\u201d to clean up, never mind that the students should be pushing the brooms and swinging the Johnny mops so at least they\u2019d come home with a practical skill and clean the bathroom instead of sitting around comprehending 29 percent of their iPhone text messages and staying awake all night because they can only count 31 percent of sheep.<\/p>\n

\u201cClassroom teachers\u201d number 2,534,000. That makes for a nationwide student\/teacher ratio of 15.4:1, which compares reasonably with the 13.3:1 ratio in private schools and is an improvement over the 22.3:1 public school ratio in 1970, when kids still occasionally learned something. But the people-doing-who-knows-what\/teacher ratio is getting close to 1:1.<\/p>\n

P.J. O’Rourke, “End Them, Don\u2019t Mend Them: It\u2019s time to shutter America\u2019s bloated schools”, Weekly Standard<\/em><\/a>, 2010-06-21<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As of 2006 — of course the numbers are out of date — 4,615,000 people were employed full-time by some 13,000 school districts (although if school districts used the same definition of \u201cfull-time\u201d as the rest of us the number we\u2019re talking about would be zero). Of these 4,615,000 there are 300,000 \u201cclerical and secretarial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,79,41,13],"tags":[374,156,95],"class_list":["post-4112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-education","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-children","tag-fail","tag-jobs"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-14k","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4112"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4114,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4112\/revisions\/4114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}