Even as Chancellor Joel Klein is promising to trim excess school bureaucrats, the number of employees working in the central education bureaucracy has reached an eight-year high, and the budget to pay them is projected to rise 12% next year.

Mr. Klein made cutting bureaucracy a rallying cry when he was appointed in 2003, when 700 central office employees were cut. Since then, however, the number of central office bureaucrats has climbed, to 2,149 full-time employees as of December from 1,728 in November 2000, according to Department of Education documents obtained by the City Council. To pay them, the department plans to spend $164 million in fiscal year 2008, according to its preliminary budget, up from the $147 million in the budget adopted for 2007.

At a hearing yesterday, council members called on Mr. Klein to defend the discrepancy between his promises to decrease bureaucracy and the apparent jump in central personnel spending.

“Am I missing something here?” the chairman of the Education Committee, Robert Jackson, said. “If you’re reducing administrative spending, I just don’t understand the logic of why you would have an increase of 12%.”

Mr. Klein, noting that some spending on food, busing, and union-negotiated salary increases is out of his control, promised that the final budget would actually reflect a decrease in central personnel spending.

“When we finalize reductions … I think you won’t see the same 12% increase there. You’ll see reductions, because that’s what we plan to do,” he said. “I think what you’re going to see is less bureaucracy, more money in the schools.”

Department officials said the 12% increase did not take into account adjustments in actual spending made throughout the year. Last year, they explained, the final budget was adjusted upward to $156 million midway through the year, and it could go up again by the end of the year — meaning the increase between years would be much less.

Central office personnel include employees of the chancellor’s office, human resources, the deputy chancellor for teaching and learning’s office, and the office of pupil transportation, among others. A document obtained by the City Council breaking down the headcount of central office employees since 2000 showed that the office of teaching and learning, the division of youth development, and the division of budget operations and review were among the offices with the highest percentage increases in staff over time.

In Mr. Klein’s proposal to overhaul the schools, he has said cuts to the bureaucracy — mainly a plan to dissolve the 10 regional offices — would allow him to devolve $100 million to schools, allowing an average of $150,000 in extra funds to go to the school system’s 1,400 principals. He also said there would be reductions in programming such as professional development as a part of the cuts to central offices.

Council Member John Liu questioned whether these actions reflected an actual cut to the bureaucracy, noting that the regions were originally created by Mr. Klein to replace the community district structure.

“That $73 million that’s being saved, that’s bureaucracy that he set up just a couple of years ago,” he said. “It begs the question what is really happening.”

The preliminary budget also projects a reduction in the number of teachers by nearly 1,100, which is tied to an anticipated drop in student enrollment. The number fluctuates every year, however, both department and United Federation of Teachers officials said. No teachers will be laid off, Mr. Klein added.

Still, the president of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, who has called for hiring more teachers to reduce class sizes, was critical of the up tick in central office employees.

“They talk about putting all that money into the classroom, but that’s not the reality,” she said. “The rhetoric and the reality don’t jibe.”