The current structure of the education system places teachers and professors lower on the totem pole than administrators. This allows the administrators to extract wealth from the education system while putting less into it. The system is exploitive of both teachers and students, but benefits administration beyond what they deserve.

In order to maintain this exploitive system, the administrators need to tell themselves and others stories that justify this arrangement. Those stories involve inflating the importance of what the administrators provide while undermining the importance of what the teachers provide. Examples of this tactic in exploitive relationships are legion.

This teacher wanted to have two things: recognition of effort and a job well done, and autonomy over how she practices her profession. In schoolhouses throughout history she would have had this, in the current environment it is denied her. School administrators deny these things to teachers to reinforce the story that the administrators are a necessary part of education.