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They are decisions that should be taken away from the school boards because they are, in effect, backwater regulatory agencies more beholden to the school administrations they are supposed to be regulating than to the interests of the students, teachers, parents or taxpayers with no public school connection.  I saw this back in the 1970's when Josh Astrachan and I were getting our award for top scores on the Regents Scholarship Examination.  The school board, I am sure, regretted scheduling a budget presentation for the same meeting.  I noticed two seemingly redundant positions, "Assistant Superintendent" and "Assistant to the Superintendent", which redundancy I pointed out.  They gave some not very convincing answer to my question of whether we could do with just one position.  My mom told me, after this exchange, that the reason for "Assistant to the Superintendent" was to have somewhere to kick my old grade school principal upstairs.  I might have pointed out to Mom that he had already risen to the level of his incompetence (viz. Peter Principle) but we both knew he was beyond that point.  It was more a matter of promoting him into a job where he could do less damage.

posted by cpklapper on April 19, 2010 at 6:30 AM | link to this | reply

clapper, these are questions that we never get to vote on.  only the board makes those decisions, and usually once the policies are passed it is very hard to change them...so many boards see continuation of policies as a safe haven.

posted by dsm_tchr on April 19, 2010 at 5:34 AM | link to this | reply