More Staff, Fewer Teachers

It seems we may have reached what Malcolm Gladwell might call a “tipping point” in elementary and post-secondary education, when nearly half the states have more public school staff than they have teachers. “Twenty-one states employ more bus drivers, librarians, cafeteria workers, deputy superintendents, accountants, coaches, nurses, assistant principals, and other non-teaching personnel than they do classroom teachers, according to a new analysis of state education employees by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice,” the Foundation revealed in a release today. “The report, a sequel to last fall’s ‘The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools,’ examines states’ hiring patterns between 1992 and 2009. It found that, in 2009, administrators and other non-teaching staff outnumbered teachers in Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Colorado, Oregon, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, Louisiana, Wyoming, Vermont, Utah, Georgia, Alaska, New Hampshire, Iowa, and the District of Columbia, which is treated as a state in the report.”

In fact, contrary to its conservative reputation, the Old Dominion led the pack. “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,” according to the Friedman Foundation.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
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