Local school district stats
Category: Local...
Posted Thursday, April 03, 2003 at 12:34 PM [GMT-6]

As reported below, the MRT yesterday ran a story focusing on statewide salaries for teachers and superintendents. The story presented various statistics about school district size and salary levels but didn't draw any conclusions. I don't have a problem with the lack of conclusions; in fact, I think it's a good thing, considering the apparent absence of rules-of-thumb for determining the appropriateness of salary levels. That's unfortunate in and of itself, because it opens things up to the sort of subjective "it's too high because I say so" arguments that we see in the letters to the editor.

The article does observe that superintendent salaries don't appear to correlate with school district size (expressed in terms of number of students). A careful examination of the data rebuts that conclusion. There is a distinct correlation, and it is inversely proportional (up to a point). If the superintendent salaries are expressed as $/student, the smaller school districts tend to have hugely disproportionate salaries. For example, there are 551 school districts in Texas where the superintendent is paid $100/student or higher (ranging up to over $7,000 per student!). Of that group, only two districts have more than 1,000 students, and the average enrollment was 342. But, of course, this is just playing with numbers; this is a common phenomenon, and I'm sure there's a statistical analysis term for it. Not being a statistician, all I can do is describe the situation.

But, here are some more relevant comparisons, based on TEA data readily available here and here:

I chose the Beaumont ISD as one of the comparisons because its enrollment is so close to MISD's. Lubbock was thrown into the mix because of its geographical proximity...and because of our apparently ingrained desire to "be more like Lubbock."

The "multiple of average teacher salary" is an interesting statistic. Unfortunately, due to the way the TEA data is formatted, I couldn't easily do a ranking of districts on this factor. However, looking at a few of the larger districts in the state (the ones where teacher salaries could be expected to be on the higher end) the multiples are all higher than Midland's.

Of course, this is the same factor that has put so many CEOs in the hot seat. The gap between the highest and lowest paid employees (or even using the average salary) in a large corporation makes the puny multiples we see here pale in comparison.

I'm not an apologist for MISDs salary structure. I don't know what the right salary level is...but I can say that I don't see anything in the data that says MISD's is wrong. Any institution that is charged with being a steward of the public's finances should apply this factor to its hiring decisions: get the best person you can for the least amount of money. We can easily quantify the latter factor; it's the first criterion that gives us fits. The scariest situation is where the money decides the quality, rather than vice versa. There's too much at stake to build an educational system around that principle.

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