From what I've seen, there's been a consistent drain of funds from education to administration and overhead expenses over the decades. Shop, home ec, PE, music, art, all take a back seat to ever more administrative staff to handle ever more administrative tasks. Anyway, the cheapest thing to insure is students parked behind desks listening attentively. Put a tool in their hand, from a paintbrush to a welder, and now you've opened up a whole can of liability worms. Besides, if all students go to college, why waste their time with practical or artistic concerns that might lead to careers where they actually have to get their hands dirty? How distasteful. Better that students learn proper bubble-filling techniques and the social skills necessary to being a voting, obeying, productive unit of the collective than feed one's individual needs and interests.
Public education has been bureaucratized to death. R.I.P. Separation of church and state is meaningless when education is state-controlled, and worship of the state is the new religion.
Parts of this I agree with, and parts are way off base, in my opinion. And it very much depends on the school and the school district.
I think you'd be surprised at how many people inside education agree with you about shop classes, art, music, and PE. But even there, there are some things that are better than when I went to high school. For instance, in our district, the Home Ec program has evolved into a culinary arts programs. They're basically training students to be chefs, and once a month, they prepare and sell lunches to the staff. And they do a great job of it at both high schools in our district. The high school I'm teaching at now likewise has an outstanding auto shop program, where they're training students to be certified mechanics. Some of them already have jobs in local shops. The other high school in the district has an excellent robotics and computer aided drafting program. And both schools have some very interesting things going on in the music programs. On the bad side, other than robotics, the other high school in the district (where I was until this school year) has abandoned all its shop classes. The wood shop teacher retired a couple of years ago, and the principal decided that the equipment was so old (relic status was his term for it) that it wasn't worth the investment to update it. But all that said, it's a big concern to a lot of us that the push to make everyone "college ready" is doing a disservice to those kids who aren't and don't want to go to college. I think, now the NCLB has been replaced, that there might be a swing back to offering more vocational classes, but it takes time. The nature of the beast is that change happens slowly. But liability has nothing to do with any of that. It's two things: NCLB's focus on improving English and Math scores (which pushed even science and social studies to the side), and the cost of equipment to run a good shop program. Of the two, I would say NCLB was the bigger factor. The really nefarious thing that NCLB did was hog so much of the instruction hours at the elementary school level for English and Math. My district apparently pretty much abandoned science education at the elementary school level, and now that we have new science standards that are built around kids learning science starting in kindergarten, they're struggling to figure out how to fit it back in.
However, the part I disagree with you about, though, is the administration. There are not really substantially more administrators and staff at the high schools I've worked at than there were when I went to school. We have a principal, two assistant principals, and a dean. I think my high school had one assistant principal - but it was a smaller high school. I think, accounting for that, we have about the same number of administrators per student as my high school did in the '70s. And my observation is that we need them. They are always busy. We may have a larger clerical staff. I'm not sure.
Have there been increased bureaucratic demands? Sure. Most of them have to do with states adopting subject-matter standards instead of letting districts do whatever the hell they want. And testing to meet those standards. And NCLB requiring districts that don't do well on standardized tests be punished. And pretty much everything that every other industry has to deal with to exist in a more sophisticated society than we had 50 years ago.
On the other hand, and I've said this before, the ratio of management/administrative staff to workers is much lower than it was in my previous career in the electronics industry. There are far, far fewer people in a supervisory role. There are far, far fewer people in support roles (like IT, business operations, etc). There is much, much less money spent on basic supplies - money is really, really tight. For example, we typically get $200-400 a year for classroom supplies, and have to look to outside sources like grants and donations if we need more. Or, more commonly, our own wallets. So I'm not buying the overblown bureaucracy argument. I can directly compare the demands between two industries, and I know which one had the bigger bureaucracy. And it wasn't education.