Overspending Education

Across the board, the cost of education is skyrocketing. Recently, the Mecklenburg County School Board approved an operational budget approaching $1 billion. In Wake County, the school board approved a more than $1 billion request for facility needs. Even the Chapel Hill – Carrboro School system, recipient of a special property tax designated to schools, may request a tax hike for district residents.

Public officials’ growing appetite for spending ever-increasing sums of money is not just a local or state issue. It is, in fact, a national problem. Total U.S. expenditures for elementary and secondary education already exceed $500 billion, and trend lines show no slow-down any time soon.

Nowhere is over-the-top spending more evident than when it comes to the salaries of top school administrators. Fortunately, the media is shining a bit of sunlight into this little-known area of monetary excess. This week, controversy over superintendents’ salary packages hit the front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In Atlanta, all of the metro-area school superintendents earn more in base salary than Georgia’s governor. Moreover, most superintendents’ contracts fail to reveal the total earnings package. In addition to base pay, superintendents receive a host of perks, ranging from car allowances, to satellite radio, to OnStar service, and vehicle shampoo wash and waxes.

In March, the State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation, an independent government watchdog group, released a scathing report, Taxpayers Beware: What You Don’t Know Can Cost You (PDF). This report roundly criticized the shroud of secrecy surrounding superintendents’ salary packages, revealing that superintendents are often compensated in ways that are not evident to the public. They recommend “sweeping reforms to ensure full public disclosure, control and oversight of pay and benefit practices that cost New Jersey taxpayers millions of dollars every year.”

Superintendents in our own state also appear to be riding the gravy train. Cabarrus County has a superintendent’s package worth more than $160,000, while Durham County just signed a superintendent contract starting at $185,000 a year. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the largest school system in the state, just concluded their superintendent search, rewarding Dr. Peter Gorman with an eye-popping $310,000 contract, including benefits.

The message to school boards is that superintendent’s salaries need to be competitive. That may well be. But back-door negotiations and padded contracts are unacceptable. Superintendents’ salaries should stand up to the same taxpayer scrutiny given to the compensation of other public employees.

Moreover, bloated salaries serve as a real roadblock to reform. Overpaid bureaucrats are unlikely to shake up a system (however ill-performing) that provides them with such abundant creature comforts. Not surprisingly, the Association of School Administrators (including superintendents) is one of the most outspoken groups opposing any form of school choice.

What can we do? Real change starts with accountability. Administrators on the public dole must be transparent and fully disclose all earnings and benefits. After all, taxpayers should have some say in how much public officials earn. In the end, what would you rather spend your tax dollars on: a Cadillac Escalade for your school superintendent or classroom materials for K-12 students?

Lyndalyn Kakadelis is the Director of the North Carolina Education Alliance. This article first appeared on their website, www.nceducationalliance.org.