{"id":34789,"date":"2013-03-04T07:30:29","date_gmt":"2013-03-04T13:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=34789"},"modified":"2013-03-04T07:30:04","modified_gmt":"2013-03-04T13:30:04","slug":"wagging-the-cash-cow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=34789","title":{"rendered":"Wagging The Cash Cow"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the public school district where I grew up, and where my Dad taught most of his career, I don’t remember a lot of “administrators”; I think the Superintendent had a secretary; each school had a principal, the high school and junior highs had assistants, each school had a secretary; there were a couple of guidance counselors, and a couple of special ed people. \u00a0 If there were thirty paid staff in the whole distric\u00e5t that weren’t teachers, I’d be amazed.<\/p>\n

Thing have changed<\/a>; Tom Steward notes the changes in the form of a pop quiz:<\/p>\n

A quick true or false pop quiz based on a surprising new education study provides some clues to why K-12 public school funding constitutes the biggest line item in Minnesota\u2019s state budget again this year.<\/p>\n

1: Minnesota public schools employ more administrators and other non-teaching staff than classroom teachers.<\/strong><\/p>\n

True. Minnesota public schools employ 3,000 more non-classroom staff than teachers.<\/p>\n

2: The growth in non-teaching staff has outpaced the increase in students by more than 50 percent.<\/strong><\/p>\n

True. While the student population increased by eight percent, the growth rate of non-teaching personnel exploded by 68 percent between 1992-2009.<\/p>\n

3: Minnesota schools could pay their teachers more with the cost savings from \u201cextra\u201d non-teaching staff.<\/strong><\/p>\n

True. Classroom teachers could earn $15,000 more every year with the savings.<\/p>\n

Those answers put Minnesota in a class of 21 states flagged as \u201ctop-heavy\u201d in the number of non-teaching staff employed in public schools in a new report, \u201cThe School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America\u2019s Public Schools, Part II.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This has been creeping up on everyone. \u00a0Remember the district I grew up in? \u00a0Not long after I graduated, the number of admins started growing. \u00a0They soon had their own building (a disused storefront). \u00a0Then another bigger building – which, my dad noted after decades of teaching summer school in a room that felt like a toaster oven, had air conditioning.<\/p>\n

Education administration has been a booming business. \u00a0That sounds so cynical when I put it that way. \u00a0That’s intentional:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have increased employment in public schools at a much greater rate than the increase in students, and the most disconcerting part of that trend is that we\u2019ve hired more administrators and other staff than teachers,\u201d said Ben Scafidi, author of the report for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ll add emphasis:<\/p>\n

Minnesota public schools have put 20,000 more \u201cnon-teaching personnel\u201d on the payroll than the number needed to keep pace with the growth in students between 1992-2009<\/strong>, according to the analysis of data reported by state schools to the US Department of Education. Overall, non-teaching staff outnumbers teachers in the state\u2019s public schools by about 3,000 employees.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And if the response to this is “we need the administrators to deal with the bureaucracy involved in education…” – well, the followup question asks itself, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the public school district where I grew up, and where my Dad taught most of his career, I don’t remember a lot of “administrators”; I think the Superintendent had a secretary; each school had a principal, the high school and junior highs had assistants, each school had a secretary; there were a couple of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34789"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34799,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34789\/revisions\/34799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}