Last summer, the New York City school system overhauled its special education procedures with leaders vowing to "cut bureaucratic deadwood and shift teachers and resources to the classrooms where they are most needed." Today's New York Times reports that this reorganization has been disastrous ("With Students Overlooked and Files Lost, Special Ed Streamlining Looks Like a Train Wreck"). The problem, it seems, is that all the administrators - the rhetorical "bureaucratic deadwood" - actually played an important role. Now no one can find student files, receiving schools still have no idea that students that arrived in September should receive Special Ed services, and when parents or teachers call for information or assistance, no one answers the phone. The architects of the restructuring say all of this should be done by computer, but none of the people out in the schools have computers that work, never mind whether they know how to use them. With all the many diverse laws governing education in America today (see earlier entries re No Child Left Behind), school systems absolutely require significant administrative overhead to make the system work. If the system doesn't work, all the talk about "putting resources in the classroom" is just empty rhetoric.