Teacher turnover is high, no one is satisfied with their pay, and why are there so many school administrators?
Notes on Monday's School Board Meeting
Note: This will be the only newsletter this week.
We are definitely in a crisis situation with educators.
- Wauwatosa School Board President, Sharon Muehlfeld
I.
Over the last year, the School District had 99 teachers1 leave the District. Turnover has risen over the last several years and is now at 16%. Some of these resignations were from retirements, but the vast majority were from teachers leaving to work at another district or leaving the profession entirely. During Monday’s School Board meeting, Jennifer Fotsch, the School District’s Director of Human Resources, gave an update on problems with teacher retention and the high turnover among teaching staff this year:
We know, nationwide, there is a teacher shortage and that teachers are choosing to leave the profession, and thus retention is an issue. […] We know from some of our engagement data that 13 percent of our teaching staff were satisfied with their pay. That’s incredibly low.
Discussion between board members, Superintendent Demond Means, and Ms. Fotsch initially revolved around strategies to create a larger pipeline of new teachers through job fairs, student teaching contracts, and easier licensing. Dr. Means also suggested finding ways to add benefits for teachers, like gym memberships. But Board Member Leigh Anne Fraley thought these solutions for low retention were missing the point:
What people need is less stress in their day-to-day life. They don’t have time for the little extras. […]
While I appreciate all the ideas about recruitment, which is definitely a need […] I think we actually need to be spending a lot of time on retention. Because salary matters, but school culture is what I think we need to solve for. Because teachers will stay if they feel cared for, if they feel like they’re getting good PD [Professional Development?], if they feel like their district leaders are listening to them. And data we have is not demonstrating that.
I think one of the things we need to think about is every year we put new things on teachers and we never take anything away. I would love it if we would go into a school year and go with the less is more and do less better. […] I know there’s a ton of needs right now, but I just feel like we keep piling it on, and giving folks an opportunity to go to a spin class outside of school is not going to—what I keep hearing from people I work with is, I don’t have time for self-care, because I actually don’t have time to get my whole job done. […] How are we actually creating a sustainable job?
Board Member, Mike Meiers, added:
Anecdotally, I hear that a big root cause is the administration in the Fisher building here. That Administrators continuously come up with shiny, new, consultant-driven programs and expect the teachers to drop their core emphasis, and their core training, and their core focus and run to various seminars about the next new shiny thing that the Fisher building wants them to do. […] [The teachers are] very good at their job and we need to let them do the job.
The other thing is, the burdens of student behavior. And again, that’s sourced to adminsitration as well. That we are getting quite a reputation I hear for a district that can’t maintain student behavior because of a lack of support from the central office. And teachers are just tearing their hair out, getting frustrated and just needing to go somewhere else. Now, all these are anecdotal statements. We have a brand new shiny, very well qualified Data Analyst who might be able to get to the bottom of this.
Dr. Means, while acknowledging the problem, denied there were any shiny, new programs introduced this year and that pandemic relief funds were being used to provide more support to schools. He also referred to what he called “the third rail in discussions of school culture”—that it’s not useful to speak of the district as a whole but instead what is going on with the leaders, principals, and administrators at individual schools, and that it will be critical going forward to clarify the expectations he has for them.
II.
What do the teachers say? Well, they’re not getting paid enough, for one. But they mentioned other issues too. The documents provided to the Board included a recent Teacher Retention Report that contained highlights from an employee engagement and retention survey:
Strengths
I know what I need to do to be successful in my role. 84%
My supervisor genuinely cares about my well-being. 75%
I know how my work contributes to the goals of the Wauwatosa School District. 73%
Growth
I have seen positive changes taking place based on recent employee survey results. 10%
I believe there are good career opportunities for me at the Wauwatosa School District. 38%
I have confidence in the leaders at the Wauwatosa School District. 32%
I believe my compensation is fair (base salary + benefits). 13%.
Describing this list of strengths and weakness, the report says, “The Culture Amp platform synthesized the data and determined three areas of strength and three areas for improvement.”
I am not sure what this means. It would be useful to know who was surveyed, how many were surveyed, and exactly what questions they were asked. In another section of the report, it says that of the 99 teachers that resigned this year, 44 completed exit interviews, but it’s not clear if that is the source of the data above. [Update: Based on feedback, the results above come from a survey that was sent to all teachers.]
It seems much worse if 13% of all teachers in the district thought their compensation was adequate than if 13% of those resigning thought it was adequate.
I also find the fact that only 32% of responders “have confidence in the leaders at the Wauwatosa School District” but that 75% think “my supervisor genuinely cares about my well-being” difficult to reconcile. I guess there’s a possible story where teachers find their bosses well-meaning but incompetent, or where they consider leaders and supervisors to be distinct groups of people and have completely different opinions about each of them.
But if I had to guess, I’d say that these responses diverge for the same reason that Congress gets an approval rating somewhere between cockroaches and Genghis Khan but over 90% of incumbent Representatives get re-elected: their boss seems pretty kind, competent, and responsive, it’s just that the school or district as a whole seems like it’s going in the wrong direction or that coordination between various administrators and bosses is messy, inefficient, and acrimonious. And this would seem to contradict Dr. Means’ statement that it’s not about fixing the administration as a whole but about identifying the problematic principals at individual schools and setting them straight.
I’m not super confident this is the reason, and overall I’m not sure what to make of all this.
III.
Implicitly, board members seem to think teachers are leaving because the job has gotten worse. They want more pay to compensate them for having a worse job, they’re not getting it, and so they’re leaving. And the job is worse because of a burdensome and unsupportive administration.
One way in which it can become burdensome is if it is getting larger. More administrators and non-teaching support staff means more ideas, more paperwork, more shiny, new programs, and more meetings to get everyone on the same page. This is such a common problem that people have been writing about it at least since the 1950s when historian Cyril Parkinson noted that the British Colonial Office had the greatest number of staff at the very moment it was abolished for lack of colonies to administer.
This perception that there are too many support staff for each teacher—what the military would call a high tooth-to-tail ratio—aligns with Mr. Meiers’ comment above as well as his previous opposition to some of the new administrative positions that were created this year. It also reflects a national preoccupation with administrative bloat in education.
Is public education suffering from an explosion of administrators that like to create work for everyone else but don’t seem to help in actually improving the education of students? More importantly, does the Wauwatosa School District, in particular, suffer from this problem?
Nationally
A helpful graph in The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools, Part II seems pretty clear. While public schools in the United States have about twice as many students as they did in the 1950s, there are about 7 times as many administrators and other non-teaching staff. There are only about 2.5 times as many teachers.
If we look just at the period from 1992 to 2009, the differences aren’t as stark but the same relationship holds. A few more students taught by slightly more teachers supervised by many more administrators.
State-wide
Maybe it’s just one or two states that are hiring all the new administrators and the rest of the country is mostly hiring more teachers and administrative staff in line with increases in enrollment?
But if we look at state-level growth from 1992 to 2009—which the same report provides—we find that Wisconsin:
Has 17% more students but 30% more administrators and non-teaching staff.
And to drive the point home, the author points out that if adminstrative and non-teaching staff growth was the same as student growth, Wisconsin could:
Have saved $330M in 2009, or
Paid teachers about $5,600 more in salary
There are some criticisms of the report including criticisms of an earlier version that just looked at national data, but they don’t really seem to dispute the top-level growth numbers. Instead critics claim that the increase in administrative and non-teaching staff was worth it. Maybe that money could have been saved but it was money well-spent because it led to, for example, higher test scores, narrower gaps in performance between different groups of students, higher graduation rates, or more kids taking calculus. The original author responds to some of these criticisms in Part II and points to statistics that show things are not getting better no matter what you say. I didn’t look into it deeply and won’t take a side other than to say I don’t think either side is just making things up.
Locally
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction only provides data going back to 2006-07 on Wauwatosa’s spending for what it calls “Instruction” compared to “Administration or “Pupil/Staff/Support.” And, unfortunately, they don’t break out Administration costs from Operational costs until 2016-17. I also don’t think dollars spent in these categories is quite the same as comparing the number of staff, and I can’t tell if it includes things other than salaries. Caveats aside, it’s the best I can do for now.
In 2016-17, WSD spent 51.4% on Instruction, 10.4% on Pupil/Staff/Support, and 8.5% on Administration,
After 2017, WSD passed a $125M referendum to replace old school buildings so spending on facilities went way up. This is partly why in 2020-21 spending on Instruction drops to 41%, 8.6% on Pupil/Staff/Support, and 6.5% on Admin.
Despite that, if you just look at the ratio of Instruction costs to Pupil/Staff/Support and Admin costs, you can see that in 2006, $5.20 gets spent on Instruction for every $1 of spending on Pupil/Staff/Support (5.2:1), and in 2016, $6.05 gets spent on Instruction for every $1 of Admin spending (6.05:1).
In contrast, by 2020 those ratios are 4.77:1 and 6.3:1 which suggests that administrative spending has actually grown less quickly than instructional spending but that support staff spending has grown faster than both.
Conclusion: At the national and state levels, administrative and non-teaching staff have clearly grown at a faster rate than teachers or students. At the local level, it’s less clear. There has been a greater increase in spending on Support staff compared to Instruction, but Instructional spending has actually increased more quickly than Administrative spending.
But there are caveats:
On one hand the comparisons of Administrative spending cover only over the past 5 years and the trend might be different if we were able to look further back in time.
On the other hand, I want to say that the increase in turnover and complaints about district administration seems relatively recent so maybe data from the 90s tells us less about the current problem.
And finally, Admin spending may look higher in the 2021-22 data, especially with this year’s addition of positions like the Chief Academic Officer (salary: $143k), Chief of Talent ($158k), Chief of Pupil and Family supports ($143k), Director of Data Quality and Analytics ($120k), Director of Instruction ($115k), Director of Special Education ($126k), and Director of Student Success ($115k).
IV.
But maybe we’re not even counting correctly. During Monday’s meeting, one teacher at Whitman Middle Schools made the following point:
I have a comment that aligns with Mr. Meier's concern regarding the cost involved in the positions that are continually being added to the district that have no direct contact with students. In particular, I’m speaking of the academic coaching, for example, literacy coaches, math coaches, equity coaches, innovation specialists, etc. Please note that the contracts of these coaching positions [are] categorized as teachers, yet they never provide any direct instruction to students. The district is continuing to create these type of academic coaching positions that do not appear to be financially dependent on the revenue that’s gained based on student enrollment.
Yet classroom teaching positions are being cut for the upcoming year based on lower enrollment. For example, 3.75 FTEs2 were cut from Whitman. As noted in the media and school board meetings, Whitman is the school in need. The positions being cut involve daily instruction for students and the elimination of these FTEs impact face-to-face instruction with students and have a direct impact on student learning and student engagement. If the district is truly focused on closing gaps and raising achievement, why is it cutting positions that directly serve students with quality face-to-face instruction instead of adding the positions that are housed in offices—often time in Fisher and other places far away from students?
Additionally, if we are a data driven district, and we’re going to continue to use these academic coaching positions, I have a few questions: Is there data that proves that these academic coaching positions have improved student learning or have begun closing achievement gaps? If there is data, what have we learned from it? And then what specific evaluation tools are being used to collect data on the success of academic coaches? Because if these positions are truly supporting our best practices, why aren’t we evaluating the quality of them and the outcomes of these positions?
While many teachers were hired over the past year, most were replacements for those that had resigned. As the teacher above stated, there were very few new pure teaching positions added over the last year.
I looked at the Consent Agendas for every meeting over the past year, because it usually contains new hires that need approval by the School Board.
I counted 23 new hires classified as teaching roles.
However, nearly 12 of these new hires classified as teaching positions don’t seem to involve teaching. These included jobs like:
Curriculum Coordinators for science, math, and English
Something called Student Growth Coordinators
A Diagnostician
School Psychologists
An Occupational Therapist
There were only about 8.5 new hires for what most would traditionally consider a “teaching” role. These included a new first grade teacher position at Madison; a second grade and fifth grade teacher at Eisenhower; Senior Kindergarten teachers at Madison, Washington, and Eisenhower; an increase in hours for an Art teacher at Eisenhower; an Education Technology teacher at Wauwatosa West, and a half-time Junior Kindergarten teacher at McKinley. If we include new special education teaching positions, the total new teaching positions rises to 11.
Conclusion: Slightly over half of new teaching positions were for things that don’t necessarily involve teaching. And if we counted this as spending for Support staff rather than spending on Instruction, it would tend to magnify the results in part (III) where we saw that Support staff spending was increasing more quickly than Instructional spending.
V.
Overall, I’m not sure what to think. Administrative spending doesn’t seem to be increasing that much, and teachers that get surveyed seem to like at least their own boss, if not other people’s bosses. I would also think that extra support staff might be considered helpful, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. Teachers are leaving in droves and don’t feel like they get paid enough.
I think a common perception is that administrators don’t seem to add much value and instead tend only to create more work for other people. They hold lots of useless meetings and demand that you attend them, hire underlings that ask for new information and paperwork that nobody ever cared about before, institute new processes that generate new data that in turn generates new questions that feel compelled to get answers to. So they hold more useless meetings and ask for new information and paperwork that nobody ever cared about before, etc., etc.
A cynical view might be that this occurs because people want to grab power and will generate work to justify their existence. But I don’t think narcissism and megalomania are necessary ingredients for two reasons:
Most people want to be helpful, and I think it’s actually somewhat rare that people will be content to take a job and do nothing because they know it’s useless. You can get as much destructive make-work from well-intentioned people that are just trying to help as you can from someone trying to feel important or convince others that they’re doing something worthwhile even when they know in their heart-of-hearts that they’re not.
Administrators don’t operate in a vacuum. Instead, they are often trying to respond to the complaints and well-meaning suggestions of parents or adhere to new laws from the federal government that demand more services or additional protections for students but fail to provide money for them. They’re responding to ominous Dear Colleague Letters from the Department of Education that threaten lawsuits or the loss of federal funding if they are not complied with, and they’re trying to avoid consent decrees from the Department of Justice.
To make sure children’s rights aren’t infringed, that parents are happy, that they’re not going to get sued, and that if they are sued they have a reasonable hope of winning, they hire experts and coordinators and Chiefs of Such-and-Such and institute processes that they can point to and say, “But we have a Chief of Such-and-Such and have mandatory trainings on so-and-so, and made all reasonable attempts to comply with whatever law we’re being accused of violating.”
So I think there’s also a sense in which administrators, even if they were not multiplying like rabbits, could nevertheless become more annoying and burdensome to their subordinates. And I think it works like the process described in (2) above.
As an example of this, during discussion of a contract to help the District develop its Career and Technical Education (CTE) programming which includes helping schools work with local businesses to get students on-the-job training, a mother asked if this contract also provides the same support to special education students in the Transition program (she might be referring to this process), because they also need help with this.
Mr. Means asks the Director of Secondary Education whether that is part of the contract, she says it is not but that it covers all students in the CTE program whether they’re special education students or not. Another Board member asks her to collect some data on how many students in the Transition program are finding job placements. Then the new Board Member, Jessica Willis, suggests hiring a dedicated Transition Coordinator to handle this, and the Superintendent says he thinks that would be awesome, and the President of the Board asks her to report back in August with answers to these questions and a plan.
Previously, when I tried to understand how school financing works, I said that funding for schools is complicated, at least partly because the public, and by extension the government, wants public education to do so many things:
It wants not only to educate the most motivated or most capable residents but the blind, the deaf, the mentally disabled, the malingering, the criminal, the hospitalized, and…those secluded on islands among vast lakes of ice. It wants to do these things not simply because some bureaucrat thought it’d be a great idea but because at some point, somewhere, a member of the public or an interest group demanded, perhaps justifiably, that the government also consider this other goal that would benefit them, and the government, because it is ostensibly democratic, complied.
What’s true at a state level is also true at a local level. Congressmen and federal bureaucrats want schools to ensure women are being treated fairly, that minorities are not being punished unfairly, that kids with disabilities are getting just as fine of an education as kids without even if it is four or ten times as expensive and even if the school won’t get fully reimbursed for it. Parents want schools to prepare their kids for college, get them a job, earn professional certifications, teach them how to live and function independently, be financially literate, civically minded, and tolerant of diversity, play a musical instrument, and learn the value of teamwork and competition by participating in sports.
In isolation, each request seems reasonable, rational, just, and unobjectionable. In aggregate and over time it produces a system that is sclerotic, trying to accomplish too many things at once, and making no one happy. And something like a pandemic just makes all these problems more apparent.
It says staff members, but I believe this is just teachers, based on the numbers. 92 FTE/16% = 575 FTE which is close to the 2021 FTE teacher staffing number I found in a presentation…somewhere. Sorry, no link.
FTE stands for full-time equivalent, and is a way to aggregate both full-time and part-time positions.
As a teacher in the district I can assure you the 13% of teachers who are dissatisfied with pay is a representation of the whole teaching staff. The survey was sent to every employee.