In the Globe piece today, we learn that superintendents are getting even higher salaries then previously thought.
[For superintendents] the average total compensation is $147,500, according to a Globe analysis of contracts for 162 superintendents in Eastern Massachusetts.
This includes salary and perks such as annual car allowances of $6,000, retirement annuities of $13,500 on top of their pensions, one time housing allowances of $150,000, longevity bonuses and performance bonuses of up to $20,000 annually.
During a time when we have heard nothing but how Mitt Romney has devastated our schools by reducing local aid and how our school systems need more money, superintendents have been racking in more and more money.
The average value of their perks has gone up 17 percent in the last three years.
During the same period, base salaries rose an average of 12 percent
As an additional kick in the nuts, those of us that have been engaged and attended our town meetings have been mislead about the perks and salaries.
School committees are using the perks as a way to increase a superintendent’s overall compensation without public scrutiny, a practice openly acknowledged in a guide to superintendent contract negotiations prepared by the state’s school committee association. Base pay, sometimes published in towns’ annual reports or discussed as part of the school system’s budget, is typically the only figure most taxpayers see. They would have to comb through the fine details in a contract to determine what the perks were or added up to.
When it comes to public positions like school teachers, superintendents and governors, many people fall into what I call the CEO trap. And the superintendents are no different.
School Committee members and superintendents, who like to compare the district’s top job to a chief executive officer, say school chiefs’ perks pale in comparison to the private sector.
“Look at the responsibility. I’ve got 16,000 kids and a $150 million budget, and 2,000 employees,” said Basan Nembirkow, the Brockton superintendent, who receives $179,200, including perks. “What do you want to pay someone like that?”
Schools are NOT the private sector and superintendents et al should have no expectation to be paid like a CEO in a private company. If they wanted to be paid like a CEO they should have went to business school instead of getting a degree in teaching or school administration. I am a geologist, I hold advanced degrees, my wife is a CPA, who do you think makes more? She does, by almost double. Do I go around saying I should make more because I cleanup the environment and she moves numbers around in a spread sheet? No!! I knew the pay scale coming in and made the choice that doing something I like and was passionate about was more important then the salary. Why do superintendents have any expectation to be paid like CEOs? They’re not CEOs!
How much money are we wasting on school administration that could be used to better educate the students?
1. Administrators, in my view as a public school teacher, are not overpaid. The value of a good superintendent, principal, etc., is immeasurable. School administration is not top heavy, as is the common misperception out there. We’re likely losing our principal to the market this year and it’s a crushing blow to our high school. Absolutely crushing. I’ll say this without qualification: unless you’ve been a public school teacher, you have no real understanding of the value of good leadership in a school.
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2. The market demands high salary because there isn’t a pool of qualified, quality applicants. Want to write a ticket to a decent salary in public education now? Be a young, energetic principal with a 2-5 years experience in a mid-sized high school. You can name your salary because the beast is rare indeed. The same is true of superintendents.
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3. Now, as a member of large regional school committee, I can tell you that superintendent salaries are climbing quickly and the competition to retain quality superintendents is stiffer than ever. We just signed out supt. to a new contract with a base at $160K. He has one year experience as a superintendent. The pool is not just shallow, it’s dry. There’s your market.
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Wake up and smell the coffee. Education experts abound, but here’s the deal. Having been a student once does not qualify one to be an expert on education or school and district administration any more than having a beating heart qualifies one to be a cardiologist.
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I have no idea why you make a qualitative difference, too, between the abstract “CEO” and a real superintendent. WTF? The notion is just silly. Who care what some abstract CEO makes? His/her salary is market driven. The same is true in public education.
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Public education a complex endeavor that, unfortunately, costs a lot of money to do well in the longrun. Over 80% of the costs in any sizable district are in personnel, and the market is tight. That’s the nature of the beast.
I will make this quick, I am on the way out the door to go to dog park.
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I don’t believe the high pay for superintendents is the key problem. My problem with their salaries is how fast they have risen and hiding the truth about these salaries from people in the town who are engaged enough to go to town meetings or, as is the case in my town, actually run for the elected office of town meeting member.
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If I did not make it clear I believe the number of administrators and their supporting staffs are the biggest problems. I understand you need the leadership you talk about, but how much is enough? You seem to have some knowledge in this being a teacher so I ask you, why have the numbers of administrators risen so much in recent years? What is the ratio of teachers to administrators in your school? How many teachers have lost their jobs due to budget cuts compared to administrators?
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1. They have risen quickly because there is not a pool of good and qualified applicants. This is basic supply and demand.
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2. There are no secrets. All superintendent contracts are public records. Get it and read it.
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What are you talking about “supporting staffs”? Secretaries? Director-level positions? The “supporting staff” canard has all the earmarks of a vague and amorphous straw man. Until you can show me specifically what positions in a particular district aren’t necessary, there can be no meaningful dialogue on the matter.
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I can tell you this, though. The district I work in has virtually no support staff in the district office. We don’t have a curriculum coordinator–which is going to get us slammed on our upcoming NEASC review–and we don’t have an assistant superintendent or anyone functioning in that capacity. So who gets to do the work of the CC? Our principal….
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As for the regional district for which I serve on the school committee, I can tell you this: we have no assistant superintendent for a district with an enrollment of nearly 8000 students. We provide top quartile academic performance for bottom quartile costs. And we pay our superintendent the base salary I stated. We are $1500 below the state avergage in PPE.
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Administering a district is more complex than ever. It takes FTE just to administer the paperwork for NCLB, the pinnacle of education waste and distraction.
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In my high school, we have 1 principal, 1 asst principal, 3 secretaries. 650 students. The usual ratio for AP to students is 1:500. Anything more than that and you don’t have a safe school.
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No teachers have lost their jobs at the expense of saving administrators. The same is true for the regional district I’m on the school committee for.
contribute? I haven’t lived in Mass for a few years and haven’t followed the standardized test news for a while, but I wonder how much the additional standardized testing (what the Republicans call “accountability”) adds to school costs.
I’ll start with the number of school administrators. I had given some numbers on the school where I grew up. I have some additional information about this town but that comes from my sister who is now a teacher in that town and gave me that information in confidence. So as not to betray her trust, I will now change examples and give some specifics from the town I now live, Randolph.
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Randolph has a superintendent ($229,853), an assistant superintendent ($179,630), 9 directors and coordinators of various subjects such as math, science, english, etc.($612,000 for all nine) (three of which also hold the same title for the high school, are these the curriculum coordinators you spoke of?), a clerical staff of unknown size that has an annual salary budget of approximately $300K.
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Keeping with the high school to stay consistent with your info, there is a principle, 2 vice principles, 3 directors (same as above), 8 secretaries, 5 guidance counselors, 61 teachers, 26 special needs teachers and aids, 3 career development staffers, child day care services staff, library staff and about 1,000 students.
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Student to VP ratio is about 500:1 (slight better then your example)
Student to Teacher ratio is about 16:1 (not counting special needs)
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Administration (high school only) to teacher ratio of about 1:3 (excluding special needs, child day car and library staff)
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From information that was presented to the school committee and the town meeting members (available on the website)
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The annual budget for the school system is approximately $29 Mil. Administration is responsible for 4.6% of that budget ($1.3 Mil) “Building Leadership” (principles and supporting staff) is responsible for 5.3% of the budget ($1.5 Mil) and teachers are responsible for 38.5% (11.2 Mil)
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Last year’s layoffs/staff reduction at the high school due to budget crunches
15 teachers
1 social worker
1 Community Service Coordinator
Day time security
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System wide
3 clerical positions
2 custodial positions
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There were other reduction is services that are not paramount to this discussion.
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Based on this information, it appears to me that the administration is top heavy (pay wise) and has seen less reduction due to budget cuts then teachers. It also sounds as though the school districts you are associated with are functioning without many of the positions that exist in Randolph. The Randolph assistant superintendent makes more then the superintendent you gave info on and the Randolph superintendent is well above the average given in the Globe piece.
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As far as you assertion…
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I am referring to the perks that are intentionally not included in the base pay. As the article points out, you would have to pour through all of the legal speak in the contract to find them and then calculate the true base pay. This is done intentionally knowing that most people do not have the time to comb through these contracts.
with Randolph to speak knowledgably about it.
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As for the staff of “unknown size,” this is just silly. Every single staff position is accounted for in the school budget. Get it and read it. You will then find out how many FTEs are supporting the district.
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And, yes, you do have to actually read a contract to know the perks any superintendent is getting. So what?
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To anyone who claims they don’t know how many people are employed by a district, what the superintendent is really getting paid, I say this: don’t be lazy–go find out, it’s public record–and read the budgets, staffing summaries, and contracts.
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Perceptions mean nothing in this business. It seems to you that Randolph is top heavy. Where is Randolph’s school committee in all this? Do the residents of Randolph think this that the faculty cuts were inappropriate? If so, they should be either lobbying their school committee members or running for office themselves.
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I did not include all of the staff in my high school or district in my post, either. We also have an athletic director and a music director. Guidance counselors, you know, are counted as faculty; they are not administrators. If I count all of the secretarial support, we have six. I was counting only those who are considered administration in the actual front office of the school. If one is not familiar with who is a licensed teacher and who is a licensed administrator, then it is impossible to gauge appropriate staffing or what is actually administration. In my high school, we have a guidance director and 3 counselors, a secretary in the department, as well as a variety of psych professionals who come in and out. Certainly not out of line with Randolph’s high school of 1000 students or so. BTW, the norms for student case load for guidance counselors is prescribed by NEASC. It appears to me that Randolph High’s staffing is okay, but I can’t know that without knowing actually class size averages. The ratio is meaningless in a day-to-day operational way because that figure includes all licensed as educators–like a speech pathologist or a guidance counselor.
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So, I’m hopeful that you can see that this is not as cut and dried as you might hope.
While I’m not saying that criticism of administration is always invalid, I’m troubled that you are basing your criticism on nothing.
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You’re essentially saying “they have X employees, so that must be bad”, without going any further. That’s as bad as someone just saying “teachers make $50k for working half the year, so that’s bad”. It’s a vapid argument.
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I don’t think you’ll find a teacher out there that will agree that teaching today is the same as it was 25 years ago. So how can you numerically compare administration levels today to those in the past?
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Let me float an alternative theory(ies):
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* Parents today offload a lot more responsibility on the schools, many times because families don’t have stay-at-home moms who augmented a lot of the educational process.
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* Because of this, teachers must devote more of their time to classroom management and administration, and less to things like developing curricula.
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* Additionally, because teaching is no longer the default profession of women (top women students today are more likely to enter a plethora of professions), the pool of applicants is weaker, and the teacher workforce of today is weaker than it was 25 years ago. Weaker workforces require more administration.
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Are those changes good or bad? Have they resulted in more administration needlessly, like often happens with large bureaucracy?
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To rebut your claim that I am giving “nearly baseless criticism”.
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I am saying that the number of administrators have increased significantly in the last 14 years. During that time period the cost of education has been going up while the quality of that education is going down. Furthermore, when budget constraints require layoffs, my experience has been that teachers are being laid off while administrators have not diminished in number.
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To back this up I gave some information that was presented to me and other town meeting members by the superintendent himself. This information showed the following
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1) Administration is responsible for 10% of the annual school budget while teachers represent 38.5%, giving the appearance of being top heavy.
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2) During recent times of budget crunches, 15 teachers have been laid off while only 1 administrator has been laid off.
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Now it is more then obvious to all of us that our current school system is broken. If you ask the superintendent in Randolph, he thinks the way to fix it is to just keep doing prop 2 1/2 over rides without looking at the whole system for inefficiencies in any meaningful way.
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My purpose in raising this topic, was to explore these observation and try and figure out why things are this way and what can be done to fix it. This is not purely academic, we have another Prop 2 1/2 override vote approaching in the next couple of months and the prime reason is due to problems with the school budget.
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As far as the alternatives you floated, not buying it. But would be will to reconsider if you could provide any more info.
In addition to Iris’s point — that this is a supply and demand situation — the weird thing about the Globe article which got you worked up into a lather: superintendent pay is NOT RISING FAST.
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Their own numbers were 12% over 3 years for base, and 17% for “perks”…. which I’d guess is probably about 14% rise in overall compensation over 3 years.
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That’s less than 5% per year. Not shabby, certainly. Faster than cost of living.
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But MA teacher pay over last 3 years has actually grown a bit faster than that. And median private sector CEO pay has grown WAY faster — 22% in 2003 alone, 30% in 2004 alone, and then 16% in 2005 alone.
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That’s a 3 year raise of 84%.
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It seemed like Globe did all the work of over a hundred FOIA requests, didn’t end up with much of a real story (their own facts didn’t support the runaway compensation thesis, with <5% rise), and they frontpaged it b/c of all the work they’d done.
I understand this is a “supply and demand” situation but those principles are also influenced by the budget available for that expenditure. Maybe our budget doesn’t allow us to get the best superintendent on the market, maybe an adequate one will do. We can’t all drive BMWs, some of us are ok with driving a Honda Civic.
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You are correct that an average annually raise of <5% is not huge. However, in a time when I am asked, sometimes twice a year, to approve an override of Prop 2 1/2 mainly due to the “crisis facing our school system” it is significant.
And why the comparison to CEOs? Superintendents are not CEOs, they couldn’t do the job, they have not been trained to do so. Why not compare superintendents to air line pilots? They couldn’t do that job either.
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I think the Globe did something good here (it almost hurt to type that). They exposed that there is a practice of disguising some of the pay as perks of the job that are not readily apparent when the topic of superintendents are discussed at town meetings. I bet now that this article has been written that someone at the next meeting where hiring a superintendent is discussed will ask the question “And what are the perks in this contract above the actual salary?”
That is a republican perjorative term used for democrats.
Why would you take that on for yourself?
WTF are you talking about?
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Masshole is a term for all of us that live in this lovely state. Politics have nothing to do with it.
and meant to diss massachusetts democrats and its blueness.
Can you provide anything that would anyone to think this has to do with someone politics?
Remind me to tell you about South Carolina. . .
…all through this thread, he can’t even seem to land on the correct spelling of “principal.”
Our district is fortunate as that we have a very capable Supt. who has been with us for 12 years. I would expect longevity to be a factor in some rising salaries. I dread the thought of having to interview for a new Supt. as the pool of availble candidates is very small and the right candidate will probably demand a high salary (140K plus).
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The demands on a supt. are much greater than they were in 1994. Education Reform, high stakes testing, and NCLB have made sure of that. You need a proven leader to guide a district in the right direction.
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As far as increase in administrators, curriculum coordination is of utmost importance these days especially with MCAS. Prior to Ed. reform I do believe that is was every teacher making a lesson plan around general district guidelines. Can’t do that now. Back office functions have increased in complexity. Reporting requirements from DOE are much more involved than before Ed. Reform and NCLB reporting requirments are lengthy as well. In our district we have received no help from the Town Accountant in this regard and have had to staff and equip 2 people for this.
This brings another thought to my mind. I would say that professions without job stability are going to drive high salaries. Has anyone heard of a superintendent being on the job for 10 years or more? Such cases are getting rarer and rarer.
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If you have to look for a new job every 10 years because your job is held under such high scrutiny, you’re not going to take the job for peanuts. Especially if you’re going to have to move to take it.
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It seems to me that the market for school superintendents has become nationalized. And when you ask people to move, it comes at a high cost.
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The better question would be, what is the difference between having an above-average superintendent vs. an average superintendent, and is the difference worth the extra money? Then the next question to ask is, how do you know if your superintendent is above average?
Anecdotally, at the high school I attended (graduated in 1994) there were 7 administrators, a principle, 2 vice principles, 4 guidance councilors and a few (maybe 3) administrative assistance.
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aside from the fact that it’s “assistants.” just how many students were there at the high school that you attended. And the high school I graduated from in a suburb just north of Cincinnati, there was a pricipal, a vp, two guidance counselors, a school nurse (!) and so forth. I do not recall the number of students at the site, but in my graduating class, there were a grand total of 208 HS graduates. BTW, the site also included what would in Boston be called “middle school.” (It was called something different in Cincy.)
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I doubt very seriously that your schools are understaffed. The problem is that the administrators are probably overpaid. Some of the salaries and perks that you quote are patently absurd. Aside from their base salaray, a housing allowance? That’s ridiculous. A car allowance? That’s stupid, too. They should do mileage like the rest of us who use our cars partially for business.
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The nutter from Brockton should realize that he is what here in Germany would be called a “Beamter.” He would never be paid over here–as a government employee–what he is being paid in Brockton. The unassailable fact that CEOs in the USofA are overpaid should not be grounds for overpaying Beamter in the USofA.
…while it is less than 50 degrees and raining on our Terrasse here in a little Dorf outside of Munich…
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What you have to understand is the following. One, teachers’ salaries will be indirectly tied to administrators salaries. We saw that with the federal government–for a long time judges wouldn’t be paid more than congresspeople. So, in analogy with teachers’ salaries, the actual people who do the grunt work wouldn’t be paid more than the administrators, whatever their specialty.
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The mode of correction, increase the administrators’ income? That’s absurd. That would allow for (voila!) teachers’ salaries to be automatically increased. One thing that I found positively hilarious was that the teachers’ unions insisted on lockstep increases regardless of specialty (the German word would be “Fach”). So. let me understand this. Less increases in social studies teachers should retard more increases in for teachers in math and science? That’s absurd.