Public schools are inherently bureaucratic. Anything run by the government will be managed bureaucratically and public schools are no exception. This becomes clear when one follows the money and consequently the source of authority. This is represented by the good old saying: He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Public schools do not get their funding in the same way as private businesses do like private schools. For private businesses, the source of funding is simple; it is the customers. Under a free-market, private businesses must create a product or service of value that the customer voluntarily buys. This is how they get all of their funding. It keeps the customer in control because they have the right to buy or not to buy. If a business fails to please the customers, then they will eventually make losses and go out of business. (I am excluding government grants etc. as a source of funding as these are products of government intervention and are not part of a true free-market economy. Government grants effectively transform private businesses into bureaucracies, which are reliant on a government budget.)
How Public Schools are Funded
A public school, on the other hand, gets it’s funding from a government provided budget. It is not dependent on customers to willingly buy it’s goods/services; it is dependent on politics. The customers of the public school (the parents) are forced to pay for the public school whether they want to or not. This is what the school tax is for. Therefore, they lose authority over the schools because the schools know that they will receive the money regardless of what the customers (parents) think.
The source of funding now becomes politicians; the politicians have control over the funds that have been stolen from the taxpayers. The politicians write rule books that detail the general operation of the bureaucracies (schools) because they can’t manage everything. (These rule books always favor the government as they are created by the government.) Then the bureaucrats (teachers) are left to fill in the details and stick to the rule book. Innovation is discouraged.
The politicians don’t have total control however. Through civil service legislation the bureaucrats (teachers) have secured a level of autonomy for themselves. They can get tenure, which prevents them from being fired. Therefore, the politicians can’t get rid of them if they do a poor job. They can cut the budget, but this rarely ever happens for political reasons. Plus, the bureaucrats know the politicians won’t be around forever; most likely they will be gone with the next election, so they hold even less sway. Now we have a system where the bureaucrats (teachers) are only loosely controlled by the politicians, which are only loosely controlled by taxpayers (parents). The public schools are a bureaucracy.
Conclusion
Public schools are run bureaucratically because they are funded by the government. This system of management is fundamentally different from profit management. The government is not dependent on customers that are willing to buy it’s products or services because it forces them to pay whether they like it or not. As government gets bigger it delegates authority to bureaucracies to manage it’s various programs. Public schools are no exception. Parents lose control over the schools because they don’t control the funding. The teachers are bureaucrats that are protected by laws, which prevent them from being fired, therefore they gain a great deal of autonomy like other bureaucracies. This leads to the corrupt system we have today with mediocre teachers and propaganda around every corner.
Good article. Most folks don’t think about this fact