By Tom Woods
September 22, 2026
One of my favorite anecdotes about the education racket comes from Lawrence Lindsey's 1990 book The Growth Experiment (page 210, to be precise).
The question was: how many bureaucrats operate in the New York City public school system ? It took two dozen phone calls to find someone who both knew the answer and was authorized to disclose it: six thousand.
It would help to have something to compare that number to, so the author contacted the Archdiocese of New York, whose Catholic schools educated one-sixth as many students - so they should have had one thousand bureaucrats if the proportion held.