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Comment by Blackthorn | Hacker News Reader

> the administrators

What throws me about all this is that their entire job, the reason they draw a paycheck in the first place, their raisin d'oatmeal, is to keep things running smoothly when the unexpected happens.

Now going into year three and they've managed to do fuck all to create solutions. Which is, y'know, their JOB. Generally they've just made problems worse by sticking their noses into things. What the hell are these people even getting paid for? They're a net negative value to education and society.

Other countries were able to come up with protocols and standards. Yet here we are flailing around like magikarps.

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I had a spouse in public school administration (until she burned out during the pandemic) and a parent who is still a public school teacher, so I have a little extra empathy - these people are just people. Some of them have just started a new role and didn't get to learn the basics before plunging into a pandemic. Some of them were a couple years from retirement and had been hoping to coast without any big changes. Some of them are great. Some of them are miserable.

It's like any other collection of people, except maybe what's hard to remember if you're in tech is that in public bureaucracies there's no high pay, inherently "interesting problems," or prestige factor attracting the bright and ambitious; just job security and pensions attracting the risk averse and allowing anyone toxic who makes it in to remain.

The district my wife left had double digits percentage turnover in their senior administrative roles during the pandemic - that would be enough to keep most organizations from operating to their full potential.

Additionally, they really don't get to make their own decisions - not only is there a chain of command but there's a surprising number of things that have to wait for school board approval and quite a few sets of regulations to navigate. I've been in regulated tech like medical device, and my perception is that what the school admins deal with is a whole other level.

While agreeing with everyone that "raisin d'oatmeal" is genius, and while also agreeing that it's clear that the US has basically failed at running public schools, please don't claim the administrators are somehow the sole agents of this. Like many things in this country it's born of a complicated web of political power being wielded in both good and bad faith by people with varying opinions of what would be best across many decades and scales.

I think folks that work in the corporate world, particularly those in tech, engineering, manufacturing, etc, can easily underestimate how different and challenging it is to run a school in the current era of American public education. You have vocal and powerful groups and sub-groups of parents, students, teachers, unions, higher ed and the state all pulling in different directions. The feedback loops are long, the data is extremely noisy, there are very few factors you can control for and the cost of fucking it up is very high.

It's a pretty tricky job that is largely thankless and the pay is pretty mediocre. I just looked up what a local principal, whom i feel is actually a pretty excellent leader, makes. He's got a masters degree, has 15 years at this district, runs a building of 1200 students, has ~50 directs reporting to him and made $97k last year.

I'm willing to cop to being unfair about this whole thing. My own views are colored by my own experience with administrators in my school district growing up, and the school district my wife's siblings grew up in.

Measured, realistic, and unexciting takes like this are so rare in these kinds of discussions. Thanks for contributing yours.

In general, things are never simple, never black and white, never simply good or bad. Things are never executed by just one person, or even one group of people, and are never executed in isolation. Everything is connected to everything else, every variable is dependent on every other variable, every action, good or bad, gets a reaction of some kind, and on and on. Social dynamics are complicated. Political dynamics are complicated. The economic incentives that often drive behavior are everywhere and aren't necessarily thoughtfully created, maintained, or even widely understood.

Its easy and it feels good to get on Twitter or on Hacker News and yell "Yea screw school administrators, they're the problem!" But it is too tidy of a worldview to even approximate being accurate and saying it doesn't help anybody get closer to solving the real problem.

If you want to help, go get involved in your local school system... if you don't... you don't need to have an opinion on every single little thing, just read the article and move along.

"raisin d'oatmeal" is my new favorite saying.

I thought it was gold when I read it too. Its use was the pièce de résistance of that paragraph.

That seems backwards. My perspective is that we pay them to do the most routine, absolute bare minimum.

If they stick to the routine and bare minimum, pretty soon they’ll be replaced by robots and software.

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