A swollen schools bureacracy*

The Daily News takes a detailed look at the increase in the number of administrators in Los Angeles Unified in recent years -- we ran the story in the Breeze today.

Management and administrators' salaries are greater than those in comparable districts, while teacher salaries lag behind, Beth Barrett and George Sanchez report in separate stories. From Barrett's overview:

Managing almost 900 schools and more than 650,000 students is a huge task. But a review of salaries and staffing shows LAUSD's bureaucracy climbed by nearly 20 percent from 2001 to 2007. Over that period, 500 teaching positions were cut and enrollment dropped by 6 percent.

The district has approximately 4,000 administrators, managers and other nonschool employees - not including clerks and office workers - whose average annual salary is about $95,000. About 2,400 administrators are among the 3,478 LAUSD employees who earn more than $100,000 annually.

Meanwhile, the average salary for an LAUSD teacher is $63,000.

There are all kinds of sidebars, and a database of district salaries, at the Daily News website's section on the special report. There's more to come tomorrow, too.

*Here's the Monday story from George Sanchez, a which uses funding at Cleveland High School in Reseda to look at the bigger financial picture in the district. Sanchez writes that struggles with funding problems at the school are "a microcosm of those at the majority of Los Angeles Unified's network of nearly 900 schools."