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> If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the bureaucracy wi
by evgen 17y ago
> If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the bureaucracy with volunteer labour, otherwise known as busybody parents.
This only works when parents have the available free time and resources to replace these administrators with their free time. The problem with this is that parents with available free time and the motivation to donate to their child's school is very unevenly distributed. You are also going to end up duplicating a lot of administration bureaucracy across these smaller districts and losing a lot of efficiencies that can be gained from centralization. Centralization has its own costs, but sometimes these costs are not as large as the cost of a lot of duplicated effort.
- btilly 17y agoThe problem with this argument is that the larger the distance between bureaucracies and productive work, the more free the bureaucracy is to grow based on internal dynamics with no reference point to actual productivity. Therefore when it comes to bureaucracy, I generally expect centralization to cost more. Point of comparison based on actual statistics from Detroit 20 years ago. (See http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014 http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014 for a citation.) Administrative overhead for the Detroit public school system: nearly 40%. Administrative overhead for parochial schools run by the Catholic Church: 0.7%. Key difference? The parochial school system is bottom up, whenever possible responsibility is pushed down to the individual school. By contrast Detroit's schools centralize responsibility with the district, and over time that grew into an ever expanding bureaucracy. Admittedly not an entirely fair comparison. However decentralization sure looks good.