The first Minnie Mouse balloon flown in the history of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is in New York on Thursday, Nov. 28, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

Bobbleheads are peculiar beings. Their heads are way too big, and they can’t even see their feet without falling over.

Maybe this is why they wear that expression of crazed amusement on their wobbling faces, like they overdosed on some kind of happy pill and are caught in mindless bliss of indecision – yes, no, maybe, ha ha, yes, no, maybe, ha.

I’m also thinking about those Macy’s Day Parade cartoon character balloons. Their bloated heads lead the way, hovering ponderously over Central Park West. Adults cheer them on, children adore them as if they were supernatural beings. Yet the figures are aloof, unaware of the crowds below, absorbed in their own separate reality.

In a way, our education system and our government are like bobbleheads and character balloons. I’ll develop this analogy without facts, relying on broad generalizations and a lot of personal experience to make my case. After 40 years in education – about half of them in colleges, the other half in secondary schools in New York, Colorado, and Pennsylvania – I know how the big head malfunctions.

Colleges rely on business models as the primary modes of operation. Seeking to increase enrollment, they hire and promote administrators at a higher rate than full-time faculty. This comes at the expense of academics. I worked at a college in Colorado where over 75% of students were taught by adjuncts. The pay was a pittance, and in order to make ends meet, I taught six or seven sections of composition every semester, upwards of 300 students per year. With the time spent in the classroom and grading essays, I made less than minimum wage. The money saved by the college went to its big head.

The public school system is top heavy as well, though not always from a glut of district administrators. State capitals employ an army of “specialists” who work in offices and in the field to test or implement various education theories.

They are the brains behind curriculum and professional development and the evaluation of those programs. They are responsible for writing and publishing those incredibly verbose and tedious state standards. They work with state colleges to force young teachers to pay for courses in educational theory before they’ve even had a chance to learn from their own personal experiences with kids.

As part of standardized testing, specialists are involved in negotiations with publishing companies to sell test materials under the false pretense that they will make kids smarter and teachers better. There is a business model at play here – a one-hand-washes-the-other proposition among education agencies and book companies. It’s also big business for sound and alarm systems, furniture, and of course all kinds of the latest in technology.

Oh, and the money spent on building expansion in all these districts that are losing population – I allude to the great film Field of Dreams and its terribly misconstrued mantra: “Build it and they will come.”

It’s not that specialists make a pile of money doing those jobs. The problem is that there are too many of them, and that much of the work they do has little or no practical value in the classroom. Most appalling is the fact that so many of these theorists have absolutely no experience dealing with kids.

I get that capitalism is about private businesses competing, and that the education system is a consumer in that context. But I reject the idea that education should be treated as if it were a business. And I reject the common analogy used to defend the bloated salaries of superintendents describing them as “the CEO’s of school districts.”

The same goes for government. The talk these days seems to be all about “making a deal” and “transactionalism.” Yet to assume that government is just like a business is simple minded and ignorant of the complexities facing genuine leaders, especially on the world stage. The competition isn’t about buying something for a price and selling for more (I paraphrase the great SNL priest and philosopher Guido Sarducci here). It’s about science-based application, social progress, humanitarianism and diplomacy.

The “bottom line” in education should be about helping young people learn. To do that is a matter of common sense: get more boots on the ground by hiring more teachers! Shrink class sizes! If this means reusing materials instead of buying new ones, or deflating superintendent salaries, or stop buying silly products that reinvent the wheel, then let’s do it. Let’s shrink the head and grow the body.

In Washington D.C. and elsewhere in America, there is a parade of wealthy and powerful balloon characters floating above us, led by a Pinocchio whose nose grows longer every day. But be warned, you adoring minions. You see them, but they don’t see you. Their eyes are on a bigger prize.

Pete Howard, a musician, writer, teacher, and painter, lives in Dunkirk.