Sometimes, I feel like a character in a Kafka novel, being tortured by a nameless, faceless bureaucracy.
Ian started his extended school year yesterday. I woke the boys up at 7 am, fed them some Corn Chex, packed their lunches, and waited for Ian’s school bus. It never came. So, I dropped off Jonah at his camp a half hour early, and then drove 40 minutes away to Ian’s school to get him there 30 minutes late.
I came home and made angry phone calls. I made 15 angry phone calls. Most the time, nobody was in their office, so I left threatening messages. There are five different bureaucrats that have to touch the paperwork to get Ian on a school bus, and one of those bureaucrats f@cked up. At the end of the day, Ian’s bus situation was still not in order. So, I picked up Jonah from his camp at 2:00 and took him for a second lunch at McDonald’s. Then, we drove 40 minutes to get Ian and came home. This morning was more of the same.
Meanwhile, I’m coordinating Jonah this summer. In the past, I’ve sent Jonah to a day camp that kept him occupied from 9 to 4. This summer, things are working differently.
Jonah works from 9 to 2 at the camp at the town Y. The camp is incredibly unstructured and random, but it’s a nice learning experience for Jonah. He’s one of the few male counselors, so the little boys are on him like glue. He says that the little kids tackle him, and he walks around with them holding onto his legs.
After camp, he has a couple hour break, where I basically just feed him. Then he goes to soccer practice from 5 to 9. It’s in the huge high school field, where girls hang out in the stands to ogle the boys. He’s preparing for the high school tryouts for the soccer team. We’re only doing a few days of soccer camp, but the other crazy parents have their kids at other soccer camps all summer. The tryouts use up the entire second week of August. Families plan their summer vacations around these tryouts.
So, I’m rather exhausted with driving and bureaucracy hassles.
Let’s come back to bureaucracy hassles. We have two threads going on right now about the insanity of institutions. We’re talking about the stupidity of our health care system and the stupidity of higher education. These institutions cater to those who know the rules and have the privilege of education or special jobs that allow them to fast track their way through the system. Others aren’t so lucky.
Maybe I’m in a grouchy mood, but I feel like the insanity is growing. CUNY, an institution that I’m all too familiar with, is paying David Patreus a salary of $150,000 to teach one class. Adjuncts, who teach the lion share of classes at this institution, are paid $3,000 per class.
The inequities, cruelty, and irrationality of these institutions are universally despised. Liberals and conservatives alike are not happy with these outcomes. Why is there no political will to make changes?
Apt. 11d 
First, sympathies for your frustration. There is nothing I hate so much as dealing with bureaucracy and, in general, do so only when I absolutely have to. I’m fortunate that this is rarely and our hatred of dealing with bureaucracy is one of the reasons our kids are not in a public school. It’s a privilege we can buy for ourselves.
“Why is there no political will to make changes?”
I don’t think there is an easy solution. Bureaucracy *is* an inevitable result of services offered by those trying to fairly allocate resources among a larger group of people (I recognize this as a liberal, who also believes that we should do that kind of sharing).
In a smaller scale, one can see the problem when one things of “loaning” money to relatives and friends who are in distress. The first instinct is to help, to be generous, but then, many of us start worrying about whether we’re being fair (maybe to others, but also ourselves). The instinct to not be taken advantage of induces us to impose rules on the use of the money (you can use it to pay for school, but not for a car, for example, but, maybe the person really needs the car and not the school?). When you expand this giving to a broader group (say, a private school, which you’d like to make accessible to those who make less than you), you start thinking about questions like, am I funding their vacation by subsidizing the private school tuition for their children? Or do I only want to fund their rent by subsidizing private school tuition?
I think the conservatives are right when they say that the only way to get rid of the bureaucracy is to get rid of the service (and, if you want to add a bit of compassion, you give money). But, if you give money, who do you give it to? Do you give a lump sum grant to every child with special needs (who could then use it to pay for a taxi)? But then, what about the other children? And, what about taxpayers with no children, but who have needs of their own? and, what about everyone else. The conservatives usually end up with the idea that you just don’t offer the service and let everyone keep their money (i.e. lower taxes).
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And, the lump sum argument ignores the question of whether one can even buy the service as an individual, since many (school buses, for example) must be purchased in bulk.
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PS: I’m so glad that Jonah is giving little boys the opportunity to be attached to his legs while he stomps around. I hope he enjoys it. My daughter very much enjoyed her stint TA’ing.
Little boys really do love having older boys play with them. Mine often comes home with stories of the 6-foot 8th grader who played basketball with him. I hope Jonah is getting something out of being adored, ’cause I’m sure those boys are coming home and talking about the older boy who played with them.
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“Why is there no political will to make changes?”
I don’t think there is any consensus on what changes would be appropriate. What changes would make New Jersey government bureaucracies more helpful and responsive? I might suggest prohibiting public sector unions and making it easier to fire people, but I don’t delude myself that those suggestions would attract universal support.
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Are bureaucracies more efficient in those states that don’t have public sector unions?
I have been pleasantly surprised at the function of our bureaucracies in WA state when I have to deal with them (driver’s license, car registration, voter registration, and, even, our federal bureaucracies, parks services, airports). My experience has been better than when I dealt with those entities in other placed I’ve lived. We are not a weak union state.
*Time( and space are different in my controll, though, so I can’t tell whether those services have generally improved (getting/renewing a passport is easier now, too. Is that because I’m in WA, if so is the improvement because WA is a low-needs state (i.e. fewer people, fewer people with complicated passports) or because WA is just more polite and service oriented (no one ditches lines in WA — if you’re standing half way down the aisle, young men with tattoos will ask if you’re in line before stepping in front of you)? or because things have improved?).
Mind you, people still complain about the bureaucracy of schools (which I haven’t dealt with, but listening to the stories, it does not sound like a system that works efficiently or evenly).
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On the subject of Petraeus, I think people ARE doing something. We, like many other parents, are voting with our feet and our checkbooks. Why would I pay my hard-earned tuition money to any school that stiffs the professors while paying outrageous salaries to people like: Chelsea Clinton, David Petraeus, the university president, etc.
I think that people walking away from some of these money pits IS starting to have an effect — at least I hope it is!
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But on the subject of the school bureaucracies, I am in complete agreement. Between us, my husband and I have three master’s degrees and a doctorate and yet we feel like we still have not cracked the code. We haven’t figured out how to get what we want out of the school system — the good teacher, not the shtty one for math; entrance into the gifted program, etc. — so I have no idea how ‘regular people’ do it. Yet when we lived in a major metropolitan area, we watched wealthy families convince school districts that their child who could neither read nor write was ‘gifted and learning disabled’ and deserved to be in the program. (Pretty sure, if the kid was black he would have been labelled as illiterate rather than gifted dyslexic/dyscalculic/dysgraphic with ADD — and there wouldn’t have been any special provisions).
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Hmm, we have acquaintances like that. As I have said before, many New Yorkers appear to believe that getting something free from the government is not just cheaper, it’s actually more virtuous than buying it. We never shared that view, so we sent our daughter to private school. Manipulating the system seems both boring and demeaning to me, but that is why I am kind of a petunia in an onion patch, here on the Upper West Side.
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I have no doubt that in New Jersey, forced regionalization of municipalities would lower costs and give you better service. (I covered municipal government in NJ, and I now live in a million-person county that is not in NJ, so I think I know something of what I am talking about.) The down side is that you’d lose the ability to talk to the police chief personally (because there would be more layers between constituent and chief), but I bet you do not have that ability now anyway.
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Which university was paying outrageous fees to Chelsea Clinton? to actually teach a class? One could make an argument that Petraeus has something pretty special to offer students, but I do not believe that about Chelsea Clinton (even though I hope to see her thrive and potentially become someone I’d like my kids to learn from).
I’m more troubled by classes than speaking fees. Speaking fees are basically paying for entertainment and fundraising. Classes are supposed to be about education.
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On bureaucracy: My wife has found that occasionally it pays to play the mad person, and she does it really well. When our high school tried to make one of our children spend a second year, in violation of its own rules, with the same incompetent and hateful teacher, and the relevant official refused to help, she simply smiled politely, sat down and said, “I’m going to stay here until you find a solution.” After an hour the official decided that finding space in another class was better than calling the police to haul her away. It might work for you, Laura. Of course, it leaves the terrible structures in place . . .
As to the privatization of higher ed, I’m pretty much in despair. The old system, for all its many faults, was one of America’s greatest achievements. Like the Brits, but in a different way, it seems as if we have collectively lost the will to take responsibility for giving other people’s children a solid university education, even though a lot of us would like to go on doing so.
And on Petraeus: this is just awful, it’s related to the edifice complex that so many top administrators suffer from. Nobody gets famous in higher ed, or gets to move to a better job at another place, for running a school economically, rigorously and fairly. Build a great student center, though, or hire celebs . . .
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