Re #1) I was a school board member and did exhaustive analysis of our budget. For primary education through high school, admin is NOT the root cause.
If you take any school budget, and strip away everything that is not an actual classroom teacher, you will find that ~1/3 or less goes to "frontline" teaching costs.
Another 1/3 goes to special ed and all that is attendant with that. I mean, my district BOUGHT a car and hired a FULLTIME driver for one student who had to be taken to special programs. You have 1:1 class aids for many kids. Special ed is < 10% of kids, and even then the huge costs add up for the 1%. This is a massively subscale operation where every school is legally obligated to deliver services.
Then you have the last 1/3 which is everything else. Food, facilities, sports, admin, transportation, etc. Admin is actually a leaner slice than most unless you are getting into really small schools where you have a principal on top of the teachers and that adds significant salary. In bigger schools this fades away with scale.
If you take any school budget, and strip away everything that is not an actual classroom teacher, you will find that ~1/3 or less goes to "frontline" teaching costs.
Another 1/3 goes to special ed and all that is attendant with that. I mean, my district BOUGHT a car and hired a FULLTIME driver for one student who had to be taken to special programs. You have 1:1 class aids for many kids. Special ed is < 10% of kids, and even then the huge costs add up for the 1%. This is a massively subscale operation where every school is legally obligated to deliver services.
Then you have the last 1/3 which is everything else. Food, facilities, sports, admin, transportation, etc. Admin is actually a leaner slice than most unless you are getting into really small schools where you have a principal on top of the teachers and that adds significant salary. In bigger schools this fades away with scale.