Now that work is being done by private contractors there is less, not more, oversight. The great majority of educational support personnel live in the school district where they work, and they feel responsible to their neighbors for the quality of their work. This is less likely to be true of contract employees. And everyone in a school, no matter what their job, makes an important contribution to the education of that schools students. We are living in a period when there is pervasive distrust of government.
Many people see government as inherently inefficient and untrustworthy.
They believe the private sector can provide equal or better services at less cost. This prevailing belief provides an opening for private contractors seeking to cash in on school budgets. In school transportation, in 1997 the largest private contractor, Laidlaw Transit, Inc. operated 38,180 buses, transporting 2,171,000 pupils each day. In real life, less is rarely the same - usually less is less. If this work were performed by school employees, all of the funds would pay for services.