TWENTY-FIVE of the 100 highest-spending school districts in the nation are in Westchester, according to new data from the United States Census Bureau.
High salaries for teachers and administrators, experts say, are driving costs, with veteran teachers in the county earning $100,000 and more, and superintendent salaries averaging more than $200,000, not including costly and generous benefits packages.
Among the 8,400 districts nationwide with at least 500 students that serve all grades from kindergarten to 12th, 67 of the top 100 spenders are in New York State suburbs, including 25 in Westchester. Fourteen are in northern New Jersey, and most of the rest are in Alaska and Wyoming, where sparse populations mean more teachers and higher transportation costs per pupil. Connecticut has no districts that crack that list.
“The data suggest that New York is outbidding its neighbors for the best teachers and administrators,” said Bruce Baker, an associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Education.
[snip]New York suburban school districts pay, on average, $10,087 per student for teacher salaries and benefits, more than twice as much as the rest of the country. Administrators cost another $1,204 per student, also about twice the national average.
The suburbs of northern New Jersey and in Fairfield County, Conn., spend more than the average, but far less — almost 25 percent — than New York on teacher salaries and benefits, $7,629 per student. In northern New Jersey, administrators add another $1,043, and in Fairfield County, administrators cost $940 per student.
New York’s high teacher costs are partly attributable to smaller class sizes: The state’s suburban districts, for instance, employ far more teachers than the rest of the country — 76 per 1,000 students, compared with the national average of 60 — but only slightly more than the New Jersey suburbs, at 74, and Fairfield, at 70.
New York’s suburban districts, though, pay more for each teacher, even compared with New Jersey and Connecticut — about $133,000 in salary and benefits for each full-time teacher, compared with $94,000 in northern New Jersey and $100,000 in Fairfield, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Westchester School District Among Top Spenders
by Ford Fessenden
NY Times
June 10, 2007
So.
Would anyone care to guess how many of Irvington's black and Hispanic non-SPED students passed the 8th grade state tests in math and ELA last year?
. . .how many of Irvington's black and Hispanic non-SPED students passed the 8th grade state tests in math and ELA last year?
ReplyDelete50%?
I have no idea of how it breaks out in our district. I seem to remember your struggle to obtain those numbers.
Our current spending per pupil is $20,300 in lower Westchester County.
That was my guess.
ReplyDeleteEd came home from the meeting, and asked me to guess what percent of black and Hispanic students passed.
I assumed that some of them must be in SPED, and I guessed that the percent, including the SPED kids, was 50%.
I was wrong.
ReplyDeleteI'm never sure how meaningful discussions about salary are unless there is also a discussion about cost of living in these places. I can think of several "jobs" in New York that pay 50% higher than elsewhere in the country, sounds like a good deal until you discover that the cost of living is about 3 times what it is elsewhere as well...except Connecticutt is pricey.
ReplyDeletetry this for context
ReplyDeleteteachers here make far more money than I do
last time I saw the math chair she was wearing furs and large pearls
I was wearing my down coat from Garnet Hill, the one I stalked for 3 years before putting it on my MasterCard
these educators have jobs for life
ReplyDeletefor life
they retire in their 50s with full health benefits and a pension - not a 401K, a pension -- and earn real estate licenses
and there is no link - none - between job evaluations and student achievement
during the board election, the community was told that teachers had never really been evaluated
this information came from the administration
cost of living has nothing to do with this situation
we are teachers jobs for life without reference to whether their students learn the material they teach
that is a fact
Chris guessed 1.
ReplyDeleteThat's another thing.
ReplyDeleteI'm concerned that white children in this middle school are drawing the wrong conclusion.
They are taught to believe in the school; they have "ownership" of the school, after all. (a character ed concept taught last year to justify forcing all the kids to clean the playground after a group of kids littered - "they have ownership of the school; therefore they will clean the playground" As C. said at the time, "If I owned the school, couldn't I put my garbage on the playground if I wanted to?")
One of C's friends told him, "The black kids don't try."
Another, recently, used the n-word, and C. thinks he used it seriously, not hip-hoppish.
Speaking of the townhouses where most of the black students live, this child said, "That's where the n's live."
Another friend, when we were talking about the Math Lab teacher (8th graders have a Math Lab in addition to their regular class) said, "He teaches the black kids."
That wasn't racist; that was a correct observation.
But the point was that you simply expect black children to be slow at math.
How many black/hispanic non-SPED kids are in the 8th grade in Irvington?
ReplyDeleteI'm going to take a wild guess here that 25% passed the test.
Around here, 25% of bl/his kids in the suburbs pass. But our state test in 8th grade is ridiculously easy. (I'm only a little confident on my 25% because it is so hard to get the actual numbers. Most suburban school districts do not have enough minority students to have to report them separately. So it's a good guess based on some poor data, for whatever that's worth).
I can't even get my head around the teacher salaries in NY.
ReplyDeleteHere in suburban Connecticut our teacher salary increases are completely disconnected from the cost of living.
Yes, it is expensive to live and work in Connecticut. But teacher salaries go up based on "comps" or what are salaries in a school district comparable to the one in question. For the past 5 years teachers have gotten increases between 4% to 8% each year.
The cost of living has not jumped at the same rate. Salaries of non-teachers in town have not kept pace. Our household income has not increased 8% every year. Not even 4% every year.
The salaries are not a function of cost of living. Indeed, the high teacher salaries increase the cost of living. Every time the teachers get a raise it directly impacts my property taxes and drives up the cost to live here.
Our district spends a little more than HALF of what Irvington does per pupil. We spend over $1K LESS than the state average per student. So, how is that our district consistently ranks at the very top in the county and state when it comes to standardized testing?
ReplyDeleteThe answer is the parents well that, and our teachers don't make $100K. We buy most of our children's schools supplies, pay lots of money for field trips, sign up and pay for enrichment, keep the classroom stocked with clorox wipes, kleenex, dry erase markers, sticky notes, gift cards, toys for indoor recess, snacks, etc. We donate books to the library and volunteer hours at school on the playground to keep staffing to a minimum. We even have had the "opportunity" to purchase textbooks for our children. Then we afterschool our children (purchasing materials and not to mention the personal cost/time) or pay for tutoring.
Irvington parents do this too, I am certain, and the cost is still $22K per child.
Amazing.
I almost forgot. The other way we save money is by packing them in. We are at least 75 students OVER capacity this year and my second grader is in a class of 24. Last year my fourth grader's classroom was a converted teacher supply room.
ReplyDeleteSo not only do parents pay, the kids do their part too.
I spent a couple of months last year trying to pry data on state test scores by gender and race/ethnicity out of the admnistration
ReplyDeleteI was told the data was "not available"
I finally dropped the request for data disaggregated by race and requested data by gender
I did get that data....but it's possible I got it only after the new assistant super was hired
Here's a change I'd like to see in the reauthorized NCLB:
ReplyDeleteSome schools or districts have too few black and too few hispanic kids to have to report subgroups separately. NCLB should have a separate category -- non-caucasian for reporting data. Schools like mine may have 10 black kids and 10 hispanic, neither is big enough to report alone but together you would get data reported.
Since black and hispanic tend to have similar achievement gaps with whites, lumping the two should not skew results dramatically and it would give school districts with low ethnic subgroups a little more transparency.
I'd better get a call in to my senator on this one.
I'm feeling extremely upset.
ReplyDeletevery, very upset
I'm actually sitting here at my desk trying not to cry.
BUT -- I don't mean to, or need to, set off a whole thing about this.
I guess I do want to put this in writing, though, here in the unsearchable Comments.
I'm having trouble getting myself pulled together.
Some schools or districts have too few black and too few hispanic kids to have to report subgroups separately. NCLB should have a separate category -- non-caucasian for reporting data. Schools like mine may have 10 black kids and 10 hispanic, neither is big enough to report alone but together you would get data reported.
ReplyDeleteI think -- I don't know this, but I think it's possible -- that my district may have decided to do just that.
Not sure.
Last year -- this is one of the things that is affecting me now -- I requested data on black and Hispanic test scores for school year 2005-2006. I also requested data on test scores disaggregated by gender.
The district told me to go to the NY state web site.
I did; the data wasn't there. (Time lag.)
I requested the data a second time.
District -- this is the middle school principal we're talking about -- told me the data was "unavailable."
At some point (I'll review the emails) I dropped the request for data disaggregated by race/ethnicity and requested data for gender.
The district sent the data, although I'm thinking this may not have occurred until after the new assistant super was in place. (I really don't remember - must check.)
I thought it was OK to drop the race/ethnicity request, rather than to pursue it, "FOIL" it, Yahoo op-ed it, etc. because I knew that the data for race/ethnicity was terrible. (I had friends who'd been able to see data at various points; I had another friend whose child was in classes with "the black kids.")
I realize today that "knowing it was bad" wasn't enough.
I needed the numbers.
In CT- teachers retirement (I think) is funded by the state. Are the $$$ in NY just fir salaries or do they include contributions to their retirement or their health care?
ReplyDeleteNo, the towns fund teacher and administrator retirements in CT.
ReplyDeleteIn my little town, a bunch of teacher retirements in one year comes close to bankrupting us. The first year a teacher retires is the most expensive. I forget why. Something we negotiated with the Union, I guess.
Another proxy is to look at data for the subgroup of students that get free and reduced lunch. Conn breaks that out on the state website -- cmtreports.com and captreports.com
ReplyDeleteThey've redesigned the website to be much more user friendly and interactive. You can poke right down into the data if you like to do that sort of thing, but in towns with very small subgroups, the free and reduced lunch breakout is, unfortunately, a tolerably good proxy.
When you get yourself pulled together, I'd like to hear about your story. It might give me some impulse to push our director of curriculum next week to explain a few things.
Next week the BOE will be looking at the latest 10th grade tests and SAT results from last year. I'm going to ask how the Project Choice kids are doing. I think it's really important that if these Hartford kids have to put up with an extremely long bus ride and the harrassment that some faced last year as the sole black/brown faces in a homogenous school system, we should AT LEAST be able to demonstrate that they got a better education out here in the burbs than the would have if they'd stayed in the city.
Hi Lyn-
ReplyDeleteDee Here (I can never get my yahoo login to work). I have been trying to determine who exactly funds teachers retirement and health plans. Where have you been able to determine that retirement is locally funded?
If it is locally funded then that would account for huge disparities in school costs as districts that have grown during the last 37.5 years (many in ct) would not be incurring as much retirement costs as older districts (say in westchester)?
Dee
I'm going to ask how the Project Choice kids are doing.
ReplyDeletePlease share your findings if possible.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHey Dee!
ReplyDeleteI have a copy of this year's budget.
We have line items for salaries for teachers, administrators, support staff, tas, yada yada yada
In the back of the book is a whole page that sets out "benefits."
This includes group life insurance, long term diasability, pensions, retirements, annuities (we have all 3. Why? I don't know), long term disability, FICA, unemployment, worker's comp, and tuition reimbursement (so teachers can be paid to go back to college). They lay is all out item by item. There is no doubt that we pay all of those benefits.
You can get a copy of your budget at your local town hall. Some towns even put the budget up on the web so you can download it yourself.
"If I owned the school, couldn't I put my garbage on the playground if I wanted to?"
ReplyDeleteHe get a '4' for creative thinking. How about when McDonald's used to say: "Put litter in it's place."
On another issue, two-thirds of our property tax goes to the public schools and 20-25 percent of the kids go to private schools.
Some talk about PITA parents, but it's more likely that they are either sheep or realistic.
For most affluent communities, demand for teaching positions (there are a few exceptions) greatly exceeds supply. Salaries don't reflect that reality. If you open up the positions to older professionals without requiring them to jump through huge pedagogical hoops, then the demand would increase even more.
ReplyDelete