An astute reader backed out some of the numbers I use in Saturday's Wall Street Journal op-ed and observed that while the rise in the ranks of teachers relative to students in our schools has been robust, it's been nothing like the rise of non-teaching personnel. He's right. I did the numbers, and put them in a chart below. The bottom line is that in 1955 (the earliest year for which there is data), there was one non-teaching employee per 50 students in our public school systems. Today, there is one per every 10 students.
You're not taking into account the way infrastructure has changed since the mid 1990s. No school had need of an IT team back then, for instance. I don't know the ins and outs of why non-teaching staff has increased so much, but I sat through a presentation about why the costs of higher education have risen steeply over the past decade or so. The need to support technology that didn't exist not so long ago was a big reason. Also, expectations from students and parents about the quality of the physical plant and the level of personal service were big contributors. Just looking at numbers and ratios doesn't tell the whole story.
Numbers of teachers and non-teaching personnel certainly do matter in responding to the false claims that public schools have had large lay-offs.
Thanks for the valuable data, Steve.
Sharon, there may be new types of non-teaching jobs required, but since techonology makes us more efficient, the expanded use of computers for administrative work should effectively reduce the need for personnel. Some states are far worse than others, however, and states like New Jersey are the worst violaters. They employ far more education bureaucrats than even most other big government states.
And of course as the chart shows, one of the biggest eras of robust hiring of non-teaching personnel came from 1965 to 1975, which was hardly the time when our school systems were making big investments in technology and staffing up with tech workers.
Education would be the only industry I've ever studied where technology increased the overall number of workers, rather than over time creating efficiencies in the workforce.