In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.
I keep hearing this, but perhaps it depends on your locality. Looking at the first hundred entries in our local school staff directory, I get:
71 teachers
8 secretaries *
5 special needs professionals (4 speech pathologists +1 occupational therapist)
5 nurses
4 principals*
2 guidance counselors
1 police officer
1 payroll clerk *
1 information technologist *
1 Librarian
1 assistant superintendent *
* administrative staff
So going by this sample, 15% of the school department employees are "administrators" of some sort, although most of these are secretaries who handle a lot of things that teachers and more highly paid administrators would otherwise have to. But I hear people in my town make claims like the one above, even though they could just look in the school department directory and see for themselves this isn't even close to true. They believe this, not because it's factual, but because it's "truthy".
It's like when my town passed a tax increase to pay to replace the crumbling middle school. There was an anti-tax group in town that claimed we shouldn't give the school department any more money because they kept the school budget "secret". It just wasn't true. You can go on the town website and see the budget. That's how I know that at the high school teachers account for 79% of the salaries, and that system-wide administration (including superintendent, office staff and system-wide IT support) accounts for about 6% of total salaries. When we voted on the tax increase referendum I actually saw a parent try to hand a printout of the budget to an anti-tax protester holding a "no secret budgets!" sign. The protester literally recoiled, like she'd been offered a ripe piece of roadkill.
Are there schools or school departments out there that literally have more administrators than teachers? I don't know; maybe there are. My point is we shouldn't believe this about some school or school system simply because it sounds true to us. We should check. And if the answer is "yes", then you should do something about it.