DOGE High School

By Douglas Marolla

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve heard about fraud, waste, and abuse in various sectors. 200-year-old people are getting Social Security Checks. Millions of dollars are being spent on transgender dance festivals in Bangladesh.  Shocking as that might be, those are small potatoes to anyone working in a public school district.  Waste and grift is rampant in public education and has been for decades — and they’re costing taxpayers millions of dollars while robbing students of the quality education they expect. 

Here are two examples that highlight how bureaucratic bloat and misguided legal battles are draining resources and hurting students. Keep in mind that these are simply what I’m sharing from my school.  There are hundreds of schools within the districts of NYC and Westchester County.  Ask any teacher (or a few administrators) about the rampant waste and you will be blown away.

Bureaucratic Bloat

The bureaucratic bloat is out of control.  Let’s start with what’s become standard operating procedure in many public school districts: the layering of administrative fat. In the district where I work, the central office is a prime example. At the top, you have the superintendent—fair enough. But then come the assistant superintendents, associate superintendents, and a small army of bureaucrats beneath them. There’s an assistant superintendent for humanities, another for math and science, and so on. None of these people interact with students. None of them teach. Yet they all pull in six-figure salaries, complete with gold-plated benefits. 

One department, Curriculum and Instruction (C&I), is particularly egregious. This team is supposed to oversee teaching materials and methods, but no one seems to know what they do. One employee’s primary job appears to be ordering books—books that sit in boxes, unused, in a storage area that looks like the back room of a 1958 midwestern library. Meanwhile, teachers in the district are begging for basic supplies, and students are stuck with outdated resources.  We have been in a spending freeze since October, and no one has copy paper.  Can you justify the job of someone who sends email all day, orders books at taxpayer expense, and buys unvetted software programs in the middle of the year?  I can’t.

To add insult to injury, my district is now closing three buildings and eliminating 130 positions, most of which are teachers. Why? Because the district is hemorrhaging money, and instead of cutting the bureaucratic dead weight, they’re targeting newer, talented teachers who don’t have tenure. The result? Students lose out on quality instruction, while the overpaid administrators who caused this disaster keep their jobs. Why would they take themselves off the payroll?

Answer: they won’t.

The second example involves a friend of mine, a teacher who’s been placed on administrative leave for ‘ineffective teaching, incompetence, and insubordination’.  This useless and costly legal battle defies any financial logic.  For those unfamiliar, administrative leave means the teacher is pulled from the classroom, assigned to an office, and paid their full salary and benefits—while teaching zero students. In this case, the district is trying to dismiss my friend, claiming incompetence and insubordination. But here’s the kicker: they don’t have a case under New York State tenure laws.  This person is neither incompetent nor ineffective.  It’s a case of a few assistant principals’ egos getting hurt.

The Cost of Tenure Fights

To fully understand why this case is so egregious, it’s important to examine New York State’s tenure laws, which are designed to protect teachers from arbitrary dismissal. These laws are rigorous, and for good reason: They ensure that educators can’t be fired without just cause, providing stability for both teachers and students. However, they also create a high bar for districts trying to remove a tenured teacher—a bar that my friend’s district is failing to clear.

Under New York State Education Law §3020-a, a tenured teacher can only be dismissed for specific reasons, and the district must follow a strict process. The three primary grounds for dismissal are:

1. Incompetence: This requires documented evidence of poor performance over time. Specifically, the teacher must have received two consecutive “ineffective” or “developing” ratings on their annual evaluations. Additionally, the district must have provided a formal improvement plan to help the teacher address these issues. In my friend’s case, there’s only one substandard evaluation, and no improvement plan was ever offered.
2. Misconduct: This includes serious offenses like sexual assault or felony convictions. However, even in these cases, the teacher remains on paid leave until the legal process is complete.
3. Willful Disobedience: This is a high bar to clear. The teacher must have intentionally and repeatedly violated clear directives from the New York State Education Department.

In my friend’s case, the district is alleging incompetence and insubordination, but they’re missing key elements required by law. For incompetence, they lack the two consecutive substandard evaluations and the improvement plan. For insubordination, the alleged incidents—like being a few minutes late on a day when a third of the staff called out—are hardly evidence of willful disobedience.

What’s even more troubling is the district’s decision to add charges to the case after the fact. This is a common tactic in tenure battles: overwhelm the arbitrator with a mountain of allegations, even if many are frivolous, in the hope that the sheer volume will sway the decision. This strategy wastes taxpayer money and drags out the process, all while students suffer.

The financial toll of this case is staggering. My friend’s salary and benefits cost the district over $120,000 annually. The replacement teacher adds another $100,000 or more, plus benefits. Then there are the legal fees: the district’s lawyer, who will bill at least $200 an hour, plus a paralegal, plus the cost of arbitration. All told, this useless and illogical case could easily cost taxpayers half a million dollars—money that could have been spent on classroom supplies, extracurricular programs, or hiring additional teachers to reduce class sizes.

There is also a high human cost. My friend is a dedicated, experienced educator who has spent years building relationships with students and delivering high-quality instruction. Removing them from the classroom doesn’t just hurt the teacher—it hurts the students, who are left with a less effective replacement and a disrupted learning environment. Additionally, the migrants in the district – purportedly the people the progressive public school leaders care for – are losing out on connecting with a native Spanish speaking teacher with helpful connections within the district.

DOGE Education

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe it’s time for the DOGE people to come into the NY Public schools.  The waste in public education is staggering, and it’s time for a DOGE committee—a group dedicated to rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse—to step in and clean up the mess.

In my district alone, millions of taxpayer dollars are being squandered on bureaucratic salaries, unused resources, and frivolous legal battles. Meanwhile, students are losing out on quality instruction, and teachers are being scapegoated for problems they didn’t create.  The black community where I work is bleeding cash, and the taxpayers are left holding the bag, all the while getting less for their children.  No wonder the voting percentages for Trump within the African American community were historically high.

If we’re serious about improving education, we need to start asking tough questions: Who is working with students? Who is contributing to their success? And who is just collecting a paycheck, pecking away at a keyboard, while the system crumbles?

The next time your school district asks for more tax money, demand accountability. Ask for transparency. And remember: every dollar wasted on bureaucracy or pointless legal battles is a dollar taken away from students.

The students always lose.  I have been saying it for years.  It would be great to have Elon Musk’s team of laptop jockeys come in, run the algorithm, and ferret out the insane amount of financial chicanery and waste within these districts.  DOGE, if you’re reading this, come on over.  We have a lot of work to do if we’re going to be serious about financing public education in the future.