Finally we found out what the USD116 administrators care about. In the beginning we were just trying to talk to them about closing the performance gap, about finding the weak spots in addressing illiteracy, about principled resource optimization… they didn’t reply to our emails, as if we didn’t exist.
But as soon as we touched on their compensation, they started to talk back. One could observe this during the Board meeting on January 18, starting at 1h45min or so…
The occasion to air their grievances was a presentation of the IARSS’s survey (of district superintendents) on educator shortages. The results, by the way, are dire: 88% of respondents report shortage of teachers, and 93% believe the situation will get worse over the next couple of years.
The respondents (superintendents!) seem not to worry much, however, about the situation with the administrators, – 64% of the respondents do not believe that there is a shortage in that department.
The leadership of our district dissents. “That might be changing” proclaims their slide.
(Do we really expect headlines Administrators are hard to find! The Great Superintendent Resignation is coming! by the next year?)
And so they lay out their story:
– the claim that the administrators are overpaid is just wrong;
– misinformed members of the community misrepresent the data;
– the district has to compete for the best talent…
Where shall I start…
If we, humble members of the community were misinformed, that’s because the administration fed us (and the Board of Education, and the State of Illinois) wrong data for years. A query by a Board member last Fall led the district to discover their error. By Illinois School Code, they were obliged to open the correct data first to the Board and to the public, and only then to report them to the State Board. Instead, they pulled the data offline (under the pretext that they have to correct the State data first), and immediately started to spread the “misguided public” notion.
But let’s take this honest error claim at face value. The only discrepancy the district leadership identified thus far is the fact that in Urbana the retirement benefit is rolled into the teachers and administrators’ salaries, while in the surrounding district it is not. This means, as we mentioned already, that the salaries of the administrators are by 9% less than reported, which still leaves them above those of the neighbors (the average salary of the administrators in USD116 would be something like $109,100 after correction, compared to $99,000 in CUSD4 and $89,000 in Unit 5).
In their rush to whitewash the administrative bloat, the district missed the main implication of their accounting error. If the salaries of the licensed staff are effectively 9% less than what the district presented, then our teachers are even worse off compared to our neighbors. That 9% reduction makes the average teachers’ salary in USD116 effectively $49,400, compared to Unit 5’s $64,800. Is this remotely fair? sustainable?
In their mad dash to justify themselves the administration never as much as mentioned that. In the flurries of emails about the wrong data they talk about themselves, themselves, themselves.
And the teachers? perhaps they have themselves to blame for their misery! During her presentation, the district’s HR director went on a tangent that the teachers can, actually, have stipends of $10,000-15,000 (she forgot to mention that that’s for extra work) to boost their take home pay, and if they don’t do that, that’s because they just don’t want to.
(I mean, I heard my fair share of Chamber of Commerce style admonitions that one can always can get ahead by hard work for low pay in this fair country, but never expected to receive one from a public school official. As they say, America never stops to surprise you.)
If you are stunned by this mind-blowing self-focus of administrators, don’t be. I spent a decade in a large American corporation, and saw how the executives behave. Once their privileges are questioned, they go into overdrive to defend them. So did, predictably, the district administrators. They transformed my innocent inquiry into a FOIA request, and then went on to collecting salary information from the neighboring districts, busily preparing comparisons… Of course, they also complained that that they had to drop everything, and to spend their precious time to respond to the FOIA.
There are various models for executive and bureaucratic behavior (inter alia, principal-agent, and rent extraction models come to mind), and one day we’ll look at the detailed parallels and similarities between school districts and C-suite characters.
Meanwhile, a general statement: just as in corporate America, there is nothing wrong in itself with the high pay of the managers, – especially on the front lines, be that a PM at Nokia spending long nights before an imminent release, or a middle school principal, who has to take care of a mass fistfight involving dozens of combatants, pepper spray and police action. But there is something deeply, deeply wrong about the HR or public relations execs at Nokia, or USD116 making more than them…
Nobody really cares about the administrators’ pay. Certainly we don’t. What we want is an efficient and responsive governance, and if that requires the bosses to be paid way in excess of what the front line workers make, so be it. But we also want the opposite: if the management of an organization is inefficient, it should be reformed, not expanded or rewarded.
The district is in a dire need of reform, especially if we want to address the educational inequities, and the underlying issues, like the loss of teachers, and the erosion of communal fabric. The administration should stop focusing on itself, and on performative actions, and start getting serious.
And that was just Thursday.
$49,400! Will stay tuned to see how this unspools. Thank you for writing this.
Thank you, Sayan!