One of my favorite anecdotes about the education racket comes from Lawrence Lindsey’s 1990 book The Growth Experiment (page 210, to be precise).
The question was: how many bureaucrats operate in the New York City public school system? It took two dozen phone calls to find someone who both knew the answer and was authorized to disclose it: six thousand.
It would help to have something to compare that number to, so the author contacted the Archdiocese of New York, whose Catholic schools educated one-sixth as many students — so they should have had one thousand bureaucrats if the proportion held.
The person answering the phone didn’t know the answer, so the author thought: here we go again. But then came, “Wait a minute, let me count.” The answer was twenty-six.
The problem has only intensified since Lindsey’s book (this chart takes the year 2000 as a baseline):