Read Samuel G. Freedman’s column, “So Much Paperwork, So Little Time to Teach” in the New York Times of July 4 and shudder. He gives an account of several teachers in New York City schools who find themselves spending a huge fraction of their time not teaching at all, but occupied with endless administrative chores. We’re not talking hours or days, but weeks. Of one of them Freedman reports that “he was able to teach [his students] for only about 60 percent of the supposedly allotted classroom time.” The persons he interviewed are mature people who shifted careers in order to make worthwhile contributions as teachers, not people who drifted into education for want of anything else to do.

To read those mere 1000 words is to see that the kind of bureaucratization I complain about is not just a big nuisance to be gotten over like a head cold in the spring. The waste of resources is great even counting only the few teachers mentioned in the article. It is mind-boggling when multiplied by the huge numbers to be found in a system like New York’s public schools. Perhaps even worse than this squandering of the tax payer’s money is its effect on those who, with conviction, have come to do one sort of job and are then forced to do another—which they have not come to do nor, mostly, see the point of doing. Those who stay in the job are likely to become cynical; other good people will just leave.

Just as every largish institution as a Human Resources person, so they should have a Vice President for Debureaucratization——with some power, who might actually begin her work with HR. Much money would be saved; morale would be raised.