Educational Administration: Subversive or Merely Incompetent?

People who do not regularly inhabit the workplaces of school administrators may be forgiven for imagining that they’ve been transported to the surface of Mars when they encounter the verbiage and decision-making processes of such administrators. Ordinary common sense and standard business practices count for little in the world of educational bureaucracy.

One such average human being who wound up as a visitor in the domain of educational administration was Mortimer Smith. He was surprised by what he found, and wrote a book to share his experiences with anyone else who wasn’t a full-time educational administration, i.e., with 99% of the human race.

Reviewing Smith’s book for the University of Chicago, Manning Pattillo writes:

As a member of a board of education in Connecticut, Mortimer Smith was given the responsibility of interviewing candidates for a public school superintendency. He reports that this experience was rather depressing because so few of the applicants seemed to have any real interest in education as such. Their concern, according to Smith, was almost entirely with the machinery of education, with the equipment and organization of schools, rather than with the purposes of education. And when the candidates did talk about educational philosophy, the author was impressed by the extraordinary uniformity of their ideas. Nearly all of them seemed to hold the same views and to express these views in precisely the same words. So Mortimer Smith began an investigation to discover what influences ces are operating on the public schools and why public educators are the kind of people they are. And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public Education is the report of his finding.

In the book, Smith notes that one of several causes for the inept management of schools is found among the parents and voters themselves:

This, then, is an essay about education by a layman and an amateur, and it is not written in sackcloth and ashes; it is written in the conviction that laymen that is, parents and taxpayers ought to get over their lazy indifference to the public schools and study the theory and practice of public-school education; in short, to find out what it is we are paying for and to which we so glibly turn over our children.

Smith’s message would seem to be, then, that if educational offices are staffed with functionaries who have little interest in, or knowledge of, content and curriculum, then these offices are so occupied because of under-involvement on the part of voters and parents.