Reducing the Overhead

How are some school districts managing instructional improvement? According to professor and management guru William Ouchi in his session "The Secret of Total Student Load," they're doing it by putting their principals in charge of the school budget and hiring more teachers.

Some numbers first. In many traditional schools—that is, centralized schools in which the principal has little power over staffing and budgeting—the total number of students that a teacher must interact with is dizzying. For example, a teacher who teaches five classes of 30 students each has a total student load of 150. In some school districts, like Los Angeles, the total student load is as high as 250. How can a teacher possibly address the needs of so many students all at the same time?

And here's another provocative number: 44. That’s the percentage, in traditional schools, of non-classroom-based staff. As Ouchi pointed out, no business could function with that kind of administrative overhead.

Some school districts in the United States and Canada have found a way to kill two birds with one stone. They've decentralized their schools, empowering individual principals to make those hard decisions about staffing, budgeting, curriculum, and scheduling. These principals reduced the size of the administrative staff and hired more fully credentialed teachers. By doing so, they were able to reduce total student load to 80, which now enables their teachers to interact meaningfully with individual students. It's no surprise that student achievement dramatically improved as a result.

Post submitted by Educational Leadership senior associate editor Amy Azzam.