The Case of the Misplaced Adjective

I vote liberal, Mrs. votes conservative. I'm sure that we cancel each other out in 95% of elections. A happy side effect of this is that she gets campaign mail from the various Republican groups around the country, and I get a good view at what her side is up to. Consider this, from a fundraising mailer for the National Republican Congressional Committee:

The Democrats want a government takeover of the health care system, amnesty for illegal aliens, billions more for school bloated bureaucracies, punishing regulations on already struggling manufacturers -- And the largest tax increase in history to pay for it all.

Personally, were I the editor, I would have gone with "bloated school bureaucracies" instead of "school bloated bureaucracies." I can't give you any sort of a rule for that beyond saying that if the noun being described is
"school bureaucracies" then the adjective should go before it, but I'm not sure if that's the perfect reasoning or not.

It's also worth noting that nothing has contributed to the school bureaucracy more in the last decade than the No Child Left Behind Act, which created a testing industry that demands time and money of every school in the nation, created paperwork for every one of the nations 2 million teachers vis-a-vis the "highly qualified" standards, and superimposed a 5-tiered intervention system on struggling schools that in some cases supplanted already existing state efforts.

That's your bureaucracy, right there.

Read more here, if any.