School Staffing Surge

It's the sort of thing you might expect Milton Friedman's foundation to focus on. The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools | The Friedman Foundation For Educational Choice

Between fiscal year (FY) 1950 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students in the United States increased by 96 percent .... teachers’ numbers increased 252 percent while administrators and other staff experienced growth of 702 percent...
Between FY 1992 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students nationwide grew 17 percent... teachers’ staffing numbers rose 32 percent while administrators and other staff experienced growth of 46 percent...

The report is a 32 page PDF with various alternatives, such as a growth closer to growth in student numbers which would enable substantially higher teacher salaries. As a geek, I tend to think of improved technology as enabling disintermediation -- administrative tasks should fade into the (network) software and technological unemployment should result. That hasn't been happening, which makes me tend to suspect that the applicable explanatory principle is Parkinson's law:

[Parksinson] explains this growth by two forces: (1) "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals" and (2) "Officials make work for each other." He notes in particular that the total of those employed inside a bureaucracy rose by 5-7% per year "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done".

And of course this may interact with the Peter Principle.
Or then again, maybe not.