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> Democrats are beholden to the unions in education, so they won't bring it up. I think you could jettison this. It seems like pro forma both-siderism. I don't

> Democrats are beholden to the unions in education, so they won't bring it up. I think you could jettison this. It seems like pro forma both-siderism. I don't know any Democratic-leaning people who are unwilling to bring this up. If you're afraid of rocking boats you can -- as has been done in these comments -- differentiate between the noble teachers and the parasitic administrators. That being said, I know that in my own company we have benefited from adding managers (I am not one myself). Communicating with people, budgeting, scheduling, managing expectations, keeping track of legal obligations, and so forth are non-trivial work which, for the most part, engineers are not skilled at or enthusiastic about. I imagine the same is true for academia. This isn't to say a vast bureaucracy can't acquire inefficiency. I'm sure there is a problem. But it's facile to wave your hand at other people whose jobs are a black box to you and say they are redundant. I think the problem with the people "saying this" with questionable politics is that they don't have a serious analysis of the problem. They have political enemies they want to disempower and the "deep state" is a useful cover story. They want to destroy academia, not fix it.

namibj 4y ago
Maybe give the power/obligation to the "engineers" (well, here it's about universities, but I know far more about managerial duties of engineering associations than of a university; though much should translate), which can pawn off the non-engineering work to some sort of group-shared secretaries. I.e., the managers aren't the ones owning the power, but the engineers are. The latter just don't want to do the daily tasks that require holding the power, so they hire a delegate to hold the power and take care of day-to-day duties. And because each "engineer" doesn't have enough non-engineering work to keep their own secretary occupied during the times of day the secretary needs to be available (for answering phones, interacting with the "engineer", etc.), groups of engineers come together and hire a small team of secretaries to keep up the availability even in cases of sick days. Small team as in, like, on the order of 3-7. Given their already-required organization skills, a flat hierarchy among them with escalations directed to an elected board of "engineers" should suffice, giving a natural damper on secretary team size due to scaling limits of such a flat hierarchy (and organizational charta/codebook restrictions that prevent any middle manager/secretary-overseer from holding actual power). I'd actually be happy to hear about the practicalities of such a structure for an engineering collective/organization (lacking any sort of CEO presiding over the engineers)...
zozbot234 4y ago
> They have political enemies they want to disempower and the "deep state" is a useful cover story. Given that the alternative to disempowering those orgs is throwing good money after bad, there's nothing wrong with a bit of benign disruption to the existing power structure. Fixing things is not rocket science; educational systems outside the U.S. don't have these dysfunctions to anywhere near the same extent.
- themitigating 4y ago
  "Fixing things is not rocket science" Assuming by rocket science you mean difficult but not impossible why are you assuming it's not difficult to fix any problem?
marcusverus 4y ago
It's okay to criticize Democrats, mmkay? The Democrat platform has a 3,200 word section covering education[0]. It covers dozens of topics, but doesn't appear to contain a single word about administrative bloat or poor use of resources on the part of the public schools system. It's safe to say that this issue isn't something that Democrats want to talk about, and I think the parent comment is spot-on as to the reason why. [0] https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/providing-a-world-class-education-in-every-zip-code/ https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/providin...

namibj 4y ago

Maybe give the power/obligation to the "engineers" (well, here it's about universities, but I know far more about managerial duties of engineering associations than of a university; though much should translate), which can pawn off the non-engineering work to some sort of group-shared secretaries. I.e., the managers aren't the ones owning the power, but the engineers are. The latter just don't want to do the daily tasks that require holding the power, so they hire a delegate to hold the power and take care of day-to-day duties. And because each "engineer" doesn't have enough non-engineering work to keep their own secretary occupied during the times of day the secretary needs to be available (for answering phones, interacting with the "engineer", etc.), groups of engineers come together and hire a small team of secretaries to keep up the availability even in cases of sick days. Small team as in, like, on the order of 3-7. Given their already-required organization skills, a flat hierarchy among them with escalations directed to an elected board of "engineers" should suffice, giving a natural damper on secretary team size due to scaling limits of such a flat hierarchy (and organizational charta/codebook restrictions that prevent any middle manager/secretary-overseer from holding actual power). I'd actually be happy to hear about the practicalities of such a structure for an engineering collective/organization (lacking any sort of CEO presiding over the engineers)...

zozbot234 4y ago

> They have political enemies they want to disempower and the "deep state" is a useful cover story. Given that the alternative to disempowering those orgs is throwing good money after bad, there's nothing wrong with a bit of benign disruption to the existing power structure. Fixing things is not rocket science; educational systems outside the U.S. don't have these dysfunctions to anywhere near the same extent.

themitigating 4y ago
"Fixing things is not rocket science" Assuming by rocket science you mean difficult but not impossible why are you assuming it's not difficult to fix any problem?

marcusverus 4y ago

It's okay to criticize Democrats, mmkay? The Democrat platform has a 3,200 word section covering education[0]. It covers dozens of topics, but doesn't appear to contain a single word about administrative bloat or poor use of resources on the part of the public schools system. It's safe to say that this issue isn't something that Democrats want to talk about, and I think the parent comment is spot-on as to the reason why. [0] https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/providing-a-world-class-education-in-every-zip-code/ https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/providin...