Not quite so simple, IMO.

Post #6,604 by Another Scott 8/24/01 11:54:37 AM Reply	Not quite so simple, IMO. Hi Neel, I think you're neglecting teacher overhead, benefits, etc. Where I work, the total cost of an employee is about 2.5 times their annual salary. That's probably on the high end, but as you know employees cost much more than their salary (benefits, taxes, retirement, etc.). For some specifics, in my school district (Fairfax County, VA), the total [link\|http://www.fcps.k12.va.us/about/stats.htm#BUDGET\|operating budget] is $1.4712 billion for 165,016 students. $8938 per student. 20,557 full time employees. 238 schools and centers. This budget doesn't include the costs of new schools, etc., which has a separate budget. According to the PDF file linked on [link\|http://www.fcps.edu/DHR/salary/wshbook.htm\|this] page, a starting full time teacher (193 days) starts at $34,069. Someone with a PhD and at the top of the step range can make $76,915. The rate rises a little above $90k for "extended day" and some other positions. I haven't been able to find specifics about what an employee "really" costs, but simply taking the total operating budget and dividing by the 20,557 full time employees only gives $71.6 k. There doesn't seem to be massive overhead waste there (as top salaries are above this average). It's easy say that the school bureaucracies are bloated money-wasters. Things can always be run more efficiently, but there doesn't seem to me to be a vast amount of waste. At least in this case. Cheers, Scott.
Post #6,632 by neelk 8/24/01 2:46:35 PM Reply	Your district looks very good.... There are about 1600 non-school employees, which means that the district administration is about 8% of the district workforce. This is a very good ratio: by way of comparison in the early nineties New York city had 4 administrators for every teacher (and no, that's not a typo!). You inspired me to do some more digging, and it looks like Fairfax has a median household income of $71,000, as compared to the national average of $40,000. This means that Fairfax presumably has a lot of the upper-middle class families that both a) send their kids to public school, and b) have the time and the money to get involved in the local schools. I would guess that the PTOs are very active in your district. However, one of my other guesses -- that Fairfax would have a high voter turnout in local elections -- turned out to be wrong. In the May 2000 local elections, the voter turnout in Fairfax was 10%, as compared to the statewide average of 25%. This surprised me, because I had always thought that active pressure from the community on the school board was essential to making sure the school administration worked properly. I'll have to do some more digging to figure this out. When I get the time, I plan on running a regression between the local election voter turnouts and administrative overhead to see if there is a correlation.
Post #6,639 by Another Scott 8/24/01 3:27:58 PM Reply	Fairfax is an anomaly in many ways. It's got the highest median family income of any county in the country, among the highest per-capita incomes. Half the adult population has college degrees. The county is very proud of the public schools and it gets a lot of attention. [link\|http://www.springfieldvirginia.com/fairfax_county.htm\|[link\|http://www.springfieldvirginia.com/fairfax_county.htm\|http://www.springfi...x_county.htm]] has some stats. I don't claim that Fairfax is average. It isn't. But I don't think that most of the school districts are as bad as DC, Chicago and NY were (and maybe are) as far as administration overhead goes. On voting, well lots of races don't attract a lot of interest. And many local elections (govenor, etc.) don't coincide with national races so often people don't bother. It's unfortunate... Cheers, Scott.

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