Work with Gary for More Community, Less Olympia

While teachers are a minority in Washington's K-12 education system (47% of employees), adding more teachers alone does not fix the problems with bureaucracy that underlie all inefficient organizations.

The US has added ten times more teachers over the last 40 years. The chart to the right (from data from the National Center for Education Statistics) compares our growth in enrollment with our growth in the teaching force over that period of time.  The red line that increases 100% is the number of teachers. 

Logic tells us that if we put more resources into the system, in this case teachers, we should get better results out, right? But what has really happened? 

As our next chart at the right shows, our national spending on education has sky-rocketed, up over 90%, but our educational performance has stagnated.  This pattern is familiar as the effect of growing bureaucracies in organizations. As the more money goes in, the bureaucracy sucks it out of the productive parts of the organizations. More and more spending creates less and less results.

As our world grows more competitive, our kids are falling behind. Children all over the world are reading better and learning more math and science. How can our children compete in the twenty-first century if they do not get the tools to do so in school?