Compared to 2015, the Springfield Public School District (SPS) today has:
- 4% fewer students;
- 6% more teachers;
- 61% more administrators (principals, assistant principals, program directors, etc.)
SPS has demonstrated a pattern of hiring more teachers and, especially, more administrators, even as student enrollment has declined.
If SPS operated today with the same number of teachers and administrators it employed in 2015 — when it served more students — it could afford to give every teacher in the district a $7,500 raise. If SPS had held staffing at its year-2000 level, each teacher could receive a $14,000 raise.
Springfield is not alone. In our new report, “Missouri’s 21st Century Public School Personnel Boom,” we examine statewide trends in student enrollment and teacher and administrator staffing. We also provide a free interactive dashboard that lets users see
these trends for any school district or charter school in Missouri.
Zooming out from Springfield, we find that since 2000 Missouri’s public schools have hired 13% more teachers and 35% more administrators while student enrollment has fallen by 4%. That amounts to approximately 8,000 more teachers and 1,500 more administrators serving 36,000 fewer students.
At the same time, the average Missouri teacher salary, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by 10%. As in Springfield, we calculate that if Missouri school districts had emphasized pay increases over expanding staff, current school budgets could support substantially higher teacher salaries. Instead, districts have consistently chosen to hire more teachers and administrators.
As a result, Missouri’s student-to-teacher ratio has fallen to just 12 students per teacher, well below the national average of 15. The number of students per administrator has fallen from 220 in the year 2000 to 156 today.
Our report documents what has happened: School-district staffing is up, while student enrollment is down. The harder question is why.
We consider three possible explanations: (1) students are needier than they used to be and require more support, (2) schools have come to perceive students as needier, even if this is not true, and (3) regulatory and administrative expansion is pushing hiring, some of which is likely duplicative and inefficient.
The evidence gives us reason to doubt the first explanation. For one, there is no consistent evidence that students are objectively needier today than in the past. Poverty rates, for example, are commonly used as a proxy for student need and are lower today than they were earlier in the 2000s.
The timing of the personnel boom also raises questions about this explanation. Staffing growth has been persistent throughout the 21st century and does not correspond neatly to factors that might plausibly have made students more difficult or expensive to educate. For instance, smartphones have created new challenges for schools, but the personnel boom began well before smartphones became ubiquitous among school-aged children.
This suggests that the other two explanations are more likely. Schools may have broadened their conception of what constitutes student need and what schools should do to address it — a phenomenon psychologists call “concept creep.” And the ever-expanding education bureaucracy creates more work, which requires hiring more workers to do it, even if the work is not productive. The latter explanation seems particularly relevant to the growth in school administrators.
All of that said, we are researchers, not school officials, and our report does not give a definitive explanation for the personnel boom. We hope it starts a conversation among the people who can provide such an explanation.
In Springfield, that conversation should begin with some straightforward questions: Why has administrative staffing increased by 61% since 2015 while student enrollment has declined? And given the tradeoffs involved, is continuing to expand staffing the best use of SPS resources — or should more of those resources be directed toward teacher salaries and other priorities?
Avery Frank is a senior policy analyst and Cory Koedel is director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: As enrollment declines, school district staffing has grown | Opinion
