Urban school systems such as Lowell rely heavily on funding from state and local government and from grants. While these sources of revenue are essential to the schools, they do come at a price. No one just hands over millions of dollars free of any obligation or restrictions. Each bureaucracy up the chain imposes its own set of requirements, all well intentioned, no doubt, but also extremely burdensome on the receiving school system. Sometimes scarce administrative resources spend valuable time complying with mandates that have little or no apparent benefit to the ultimate consumer - the student. Even more insidious, perhaps, is the tendency for all of these bureaucratic requirements to create a "culture of compliance" in which employees inadvertently become more concerned with meeting the administrative requirements of the bureaucracy than they do with educating kids. This is not to suggest that these requirements be ignored, just that they be kept in the proper perspective.