One Reason for Bad Education, Lack of Hard Data

Why do schools have trouble with educating kids, because they lack the ability to know simple, hard data items. Like this little bit.

Following up on the previous post, here is more news about my local school system. Frederick County Maryland--which is northwest of Washington, DC is a growing county and as such, there has been a lot of work done in preparation for this school year, including the opening of a new elementary school in the southern part of hte country. This article talks about a lot of the transformations over the past year, but this excerpt stood out:

Frederick County's newest school, Centerville Elementary, will welcome about 675 students in full-day kindergarten through fifth grade. According to principal Eileen Tipperman, about half of the school's 60 staff members are classroom teachers.

OK, so we have a new school with 60 staff members, only "about half" of which are classroom teachers. Even accounting for cafeteria, janitorial, library and administrative staff, I am still having a hard time coming to the conclusion that there needs to be one non-teaching staffer for every teacher. And while we are on the subject, why doesn't this new principal have exact numbers of how many teachers are on the staff she supervises? About half would say to me, it could be between 27 and 33, which is an error rate of 10%. What the.....?