Jana Benscoter of the Rhino Times does a great job of detailing the many wacky changes to Guilford County’s school bureaucracy.
My favorite passage:
Joining [Chief Academic Officer Mack] McCary as a new Guilford County school system employee is Chief Diversity Officer Monica Walker. Walker is not only new to the school system, but her position was just created in the 2006-2007 budget. Walker has never presented the board data at meetings. Walker has attended at least one of the board’s Shared Communications Committee meetings and she has attended a handful of community forums. Other than that, what exactly she does in that position has not been brought forth to the board and she is earning more than $80,000.
That paragraph reminds me of a point made in my report on school bureaucracy.
…there is no inherent relationship between the amount of work that must be done and the size of the staff assigned to do the work. As senior administrators hire subordinate administrators, the administrative operation produces work for itself, usually in the form of added bureaucracy.
Indeed, Parkinson?s Law states that work ?expands as to fill the time available for its completion.? In the case of Ms. Walker, it is only a matter of time before the bureaucracy supplies additional work for her to do, work that will do little to improve student achievement.
