We Need More Administrators by BSeed (Charles Kratz)


BSeed's Comments:  The labor movement. In 1975, the teachers in the Berkeley Unified School District (California) struck when the district threatened to cut salaries, at a time when the district was paying 50K a year in fines because we had too many school administrators. The strike began on the first day of classes in September, and lasted for 21 days before we went into arbitration; we won the arbitration battle but lost the war--at the end of the year the district laid off about 10% of the teachers.  During the strike I escaped the tedium of the picket line as a member of a group called the Board Erasers. We went from school to school riding in the back of a yellow Mazda pickup truck to lead the strikers in singing strike songs. Members of the group and a few other strikers wrote dozens of songs at the time. I wrote about a dozen myself, and if you don't start submitting some of your own, I'm going to add one of my each day until I run out. Then I'll write some more.  Songs from any movement are welcome: peace, labor, civil rights, homeless advocates, environmental, gay rights, or even such things as anti-affirmative action or english only, if you sing about such points of view.   But I'm getting ahead of myself. I went to the first strike meeting armed with a new song, written to the tune of "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching":

I'm the sixth assistant paper inventory analyst
And you know I've got just too much work to do,
Watching thirteen secretaries,
Three accountants and a clerk
Counting all those composition books for you.

First Chorus
We need more administrators
We just outnumber teachers three to one.
Screw the teachers, cut their pay,
Schools don't need them anyway.
Oh, we'll put them in their place before we're done.
It's a tough and vital job counting composition books,
There's an element of danger in it, too:
You might get slivers in your bum
Or mess your pants with bubblegum;
Why, just last week I got a thumbtack in my shoe.

Second Chorus
We need more administrators
Creative education is our aim
If the funds are getting low
We can let some teachers go--
Everybody knows that they're the ones to blame.