Left out in the cold?
by James A. Bacon
The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice has published data showing that the number of administrators and other non-teaching staff surged in Virginia between 1992 and 2009 by 100%, far outpacing the 22% increase in the number of students over the same period.
Had administrative overhead grown no faster than the increase in student enrollment, the savings to Virginia school systems would amount to $2.1 billion a year. That’s serious money!
The data appears to be a stunning indictment of runaway costs in Virginia’s educational system. States a Friedman Foundation press release: “Virginia far outpaced other states with the number of excessive personnel outside the classroom with 60,737 more non-teaching staff than teachers, followed by Ohio with 19,040 more non-teaching personnel than teachers.”
The ratio of students to non-teaching staff in FY 2009 was 9.4 to one in Virginia — the lowest ratio in the country, save Vermont (meaning more non-teachers per student), and far lower than the national average of 15.9. Conversely, the student-teacher ratio, 17.3 to one, was significantly higher than the 15.3 national average.
Indeed, the results are so extraordinarily bad that Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education, suggested that the numbers, which came from the National Center for Education Statistics, might be inaccurate.
“There’s a clearly a disconnect here,” Pyle told the Washington Times last week. “We don’t think there’s been some sudden change in terms of hiring practices in our school divisions. In fact, in more recent years, there’s been an increased focus on the classroom as opposed to the central office. … Something clearly is amiss here, and our challenge is to get to the bottom of it.”
I’m keeping an open mind here. Virginia is such an outlier that the statistics may be flawed. On the other hand, the emphasis on channeling resources into the classroom is a recent policy of the McDonnell administration. The numbers cited in the study carry through 2009, ending before McDonnell took office.
I would be careful before blowing off the numbers as a statistical error. The state Standards of Quality (SOQ), an arcane method for calculating minimum inputs for educational quality, have driven educational spending higher for years. Educational spending has been out of control, and much of that spending has gone to administrators and non-teacher support staff.
To get to the bottom of the issue, I have submitted contacted both the Department of Education and the study author, Benjamin Scafidi, for comments on the accuracy of the statistics. I will report back if I hear from them.
Update: Pyle called back this afternoon. He says the DOE is pretty confident that the outlier results for Virginia reflect a data error. Trends for the commonwealth were consistent with those of other states — better than some, worse than others — until 2005. Then the trend shot through the roof. “We have a good idea of what happened,” he said. “Positions that should have been mapped to instructional categories were mapped to administrative categories. Now we have to find out why.”
The Virginia DOE is checking to see if there were any changes in federal instructions on how to submit the data, how those changes might have been interpreted, and how they might have been applied.
Update: It appears that DOE has experienced other problems reporting data to Uncle Sam. According to this Times-Dispatch Politifact article, the National Center for Educational Statistics showed that Virginia’s student-teacher ratio had soared between 2005-2006 and 2009-2010. Pyle told Politifact that the data had been coded incorrectly. Hat tip: Michael Cassidy. Dudes, we need to get the data in. Otherwise, we’ll be drawing a lot of unfounded public policy conclusions!
