One of the key problems with schools is that everyone thinks they can run them better because they went to school once and have an idea.

If we left it to domain experts and got politicians to back off, it would be neat to see what educators could achieve.

It’s because there are tons of laws and regulations regarding minors in school, and administration tends to be homegrown (initial expertise in teaching) rather than explicitly developed to navigate the social, political and legal landscape. I’d wager that more than half of those positions are “best practice” staffing decisions in response to this landscape. A handful might also be due to expressed needs and wants of parents. Likely wasteful overall, but students, teachers and families would likely feel the impact and not be satisfied if any positions were axed.

Which of those roles specifically would you say are fluff?

This is not creating widgets or lines of code, not creating a product for consumption, this is fostering the development of inquisitive minds, hopefully encouraging them to become critical thinkers and ultimately the next generation of leaders who will push the bounds of human knowledge further than ever before.

Why would better tools be expected to do enable teachers to do that for more students at a time?

There is a lot of research out there showing worse educational outcomes as class sizes increase. This is one of the areas where wealth disparities in education manifest; rich areas tend to have smaller class sizes, and historically the very rich would pay for private tutors for their kids, whereas poor kids are stuck with bigger class sizes, less individual attention from educators, and typically average worse educational outcomes.

Sure, let's have 100 child classes which are hell on earth for everybody involved, starting with the little kids who will literally be scarred for life from it.

Teacher costs should be going up as much as we can afford, to keep reducing class sizes as a fundamental part of quality education.

I agree that admin is ripe for efficiency gains. A local school district cut dozens of teaching roles, not even one person from their extremely bloated central administration. It's also out of touch with the schools with no campus visits, and serves mainly as a hindrance to any sort of actual work going on inside the individual schools. It's a horrible caricature of bureaucracy.

You could increase per teacher productivity by running 12 months of school per year, but you would increase costs; and in some parts of California, you would need to rebuild schools with air conditioning to hold classes effectively in the summer.

Covid showed distance learning doesn't work for most kids. So you can't eliminate real estate costs or hire educators in low cost areas. Computerized education doesn't seem to work, either.

> Only if you assume if per-teacher productivity can't increase.

It can't.

The only axis upon which teacher "productivity" could increase is by increasing the size of their classes.

Every study and every practical example of doing that ever done shows that it negatively impacts student outcomes.

Not because the teacher is failing to be whatever it is you imagine "more productive" to be but because there is a minimum amount of attention needed per student for them to not fall through the cracks and one person's attention is not scalable.

What I observe as a parent; 95% of the teacher's job cannot be scaled with technology.

in California there are not more students.. all tiers of schools show falling enrollments, year after year. Except community colleges, where they have discovered that more than 15% of all students are ghost enrolled.

-- California K-12 public school enrollment fell by 74,961 students (a 1.3% decline) for the 2025-26 school year, marking the largest drop since the pandemic. This loss was significantly higher than the state’s Department of Finance projection of only 10,000 students.

The decline is driven by lower birth rates and a reduction in immigration, with the latter exacerbated by families fearing enforcement actions. Los Angeles County accounted for nearly half of the state's total loss, losing 32,953 students, largely due to a decrease in newcomer students within the LAUSD.

Private schools saw a steeper drop of 6.6%, while homeschooling declined by 3.7%. The enrollment drop is causing budget deficits, leading to staff layoffs, program cuts, and potential school closures. Hispanic students experienced the largest numeric loss (48,064), while white students saw the largest percentage decline (2.68%). English learner enrollment fell by 8.2%, partly due to reclassification and partly due to out-migration.

The UNESCO target is calibrated for developing countries. Few developed countries spend that much on non-tertiary education: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/public-spending-on-e.... Canada spends about 3.3%, less than California.

(I think your numbers include tertiary education. My numbers are K-12 only. I’m not sure which of those the UNESCO target is based on.)

The confusion/disconnect between those two benchmarks suggests something about the size of CA's public expenditure...