OT PDQ
Here's a question for you- honestly just wondering - do you have kids? In public schools?
Mine aren't old enough yet. We're looking to move to a place with purportedly good public schools, though, so I will in a few years.
While UFARS may not be "enviable" I think the fact you can confidently put a ceiling of 6% on the admin expenses of your schools has got to offer some reassurance to you as a person who depends on the schools to do their job and to be show appropriate stewardship of public funds. Texas is broken into numerous "Independent School Districts" which are apparently accountable only to those who elect the top officials, which is to say apparently to nobody, since there's no way to enforce campaign promises on politicians (well, you can theoretically vote them out, but then you have the problem of finding competent replacements).
Houston Independent School District (HISD) offers some figures on its web site:
Position Number Employed
Teachers 12,721
Principals 255
Assistant Principals 338
Counselors 239
Librarians 176
Nurses and Psychologists 318
Teaching Assistants/Clerks/Aides 3,806
Police Officers 272
... and there's another 117 administrators in the central office, and 10,645 full- and part-time "other" employees, including those who offer "support services". Exactly what's meant by a "clerk" isn't obvious to me, but lumping them with TAs and Aides (who have direct student contact) is an interesting choice. Enrollment in the same time period is about 203,000 students, and budget about $1.4 billion on a taxable property value of about $83 billion (lots of property value isn't taxable due to various exemptions). About HISD's budget:
"Thanks to exceptional fiscal management, HISD has long maintained the lowest property tax rate among school districts in Harris County and currently has the fourth-lowest property tax rate among the 13 largest school districts in Texas."
Since more folks pay property taxes than have kids in school, guess where the incentive lies for getting re-elected ....
I do not easily spot the % overhead number for HISD.
Texas' public school funding system has been found unconstitutional a few times, and the legislature keeps tweaking it in order to try to avoid court takeover, but there's no political will to make a significant change in education funding from what I can tell. The current funding system depends on property taxes, so areas with high density of students (high birth rate) or areas of very low property value have, shall we say, a significant challenge. I've lost track of the tweaks now in force to try to avoid the constitutionality issues, so I can't describe them in detail, but the folks I know within the system (educators, therapists, etc.) report a political landscape in which the interests of students and parents are often in line behind political fiefdoms and a desire to get press "innovating" rather than following known-effective methods. (We've been teaching writing for a long time in the US, and there are studies comparing efficacy of methodology, so why would an administrator allocate funds from the general pool in favor of some newfangled "program" to "advance reading" when the program runs contrary to the available evidence on efficacy? If you have a sensible answer please let me know.)
Texas' state-wide education oversight isn't concentrated in a state education office, though compliance with various assistance programs definitely runs uphill. The ISDs have a free hand, limited only by the legislature's enacted pronouncements (e.g., in a certain year students will take a year of Texas history; on another year, students will take a health class covering STDs, pregnancy, addictive substances, and a host of other things that ordinarily would be part of a biology curriculum; and students will take certain standardized tests that now cause ordinary curriculum development to take a back seat to test-teaching because schools have figured out that they aren't graded on education generally but on specific tests). While decentralization is philosophically attractive, the implementation here in Texas' ISDs hasn't been a shining example of effectiveness.
NEA says Texas is #2 nationally in enrollment, #2 in no. of K-12 teachers, #3 in expenditures, and #25 in student-to-teacher ratio on the claim of 14.9 students per (but I suspect some "new math" here as I've never seen a public school class with so few folks in it ... perhaps classes for very young kids and special ed classes that don't actually teach the regular curriculum are behind this average), and #41 in per-pupil expense (at >$7k/ea, more than seems to predominate in HISD). Maybe I should be less harsh; for being #41 in per-pupil expense, maybe becoming #25 (with a below-average "smart rating" in Morgan Quitno Press' "smartest states" ranking is a victory of sorts.
The problems facing the ISDs in educating the public on limited resources aren't trivial, and they are compounded by a variety of demands made by folks outside the districts and wielding a variety of legal and economic influences. Slowly, the school's mission is divided by its many masters, and its ability to manage itself is undermined by the lack of freedom to offer meaningful consequences for failure.
I note that Minnesota is ranked #13 by Morgan Quitno and was recently even higher; maybe the top spots are close together and small changes impact rank heavily. Vermont, which has a population less than that served by Houston ISD and is less heterogenous, seems to lead the nation, followed by a handful of fellow New England states.
In railing against the failures of Texas' public education system, I don't mean to single out HISD, it's just the only place with which I have personal experience. However, HISD's idea of "accountability" is keeping property taxes low, not delivering an effective educational service. Sure, the folks in the system are doing it because they want to deliver quality education, and they can measure gains against the backdrop of miserable past performance, but the nature of the system precludes optimizing for delivery of educational services. Schools have multiple masters (divided priorities), limited options for providing consequences for failure, and an unending series of emergencies with which to distract bright folks from demanding effective fixes. People get used to the status quo ... and given the results on Texas' standardized exams for minimal proficiency, the status quo isn't very attractive.
Congratulations on the effective oversight and successful educational performance Minnesota achieves. Since my frame of reference, and my moving plans, do not include Minnesota, those data don't help me much, but they provide some reason for optimism. Like I said, I am moving to a place with apparently top-notch (at least in that state) public schools, and I hope to discover that area enjoys success superior to that I know in Texas.
The fact that someone has developed apparently effective oversight in Minnesota should invite inquiry into exactly how that was achieved. In Texas, even the bad numbers in HISD are the result of playing games with which students are examined with what instruments and what thresholds of "success" are laid out. Things are pretty bad here, in my view.
Take care,
--Tex.
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