Corporate Education

BUREACRACY:
1. excessive multiplication of, and concentration of power in, administrative bureaus or administrators.
2. administration characterized by excessive red tape and routine

Every year around March Madness time, the media publishes calculations of how much money and time is wasted by people who are paying more attention to basketball than to their jobs.

Now, with the proliferation of the internet, I think that type of calculation comes out fairly often. How much time and money is corporate America wasting on employees who are not doing their work?

I am sure the figure is in the billions of dollars. I don't really feel like googling the answer at the moment.

My questions is: Why don't these grand councils of waste calculation ever figure out how much money businesses are wasting by having their employees do stuff that is ostensibly for work purposes, but certainly just as useless to productivity as surfing the web for good youtube videos?

In the education world, we have a lot of names for this useless work. Here are some of them:

-Aligning department curriculum with state and nationwide standards
-Creating measurable schoolwide learning tasks with applicable rubrics (Really, almost anything having to do with a rubric is just useless.)
-Applying authentic instruction methods
-Anything to do with mission statements
-Creating action plans that coordinate with statewide standards
-Developing an Individual Professional Development Plan

and my personal favorite. . .
Developing professional learning communities

How does this relate to bureaucracy?

Well, in an effort to validate the fact that they have jobs, many administrators (see: BUREAUCRATS) spend most of their time coming up with plans that ask the faculty to do one/many/all of the above tasks during the course of a school year.

Usually, there are very expensive books, videos and powerpoints that accompany these tasks. The school system pays for these because the superintendent, in an effort to validate the fact that he/she has a job, has created district-wide goals that mandate these tasks are given to us.

The school district spends, and I am not exaggerating, tens of thousands of dollars on these useless tasks.

However, there is just not enough money to hire enough teachers to make class sizes manageable.

Glad to see they've got their priorities straight.