WHERE DID THE SALARY DOLLARS GO?
A follower asked me a question that sounded simple enough:
Has teacher pay been keeping up with administrative pay?
That question sent me down a considerably larger rabbit hole than I expected. There was one immediate problem.
Going back nearly a decade, individual administrator compensation reports aren't consistently available. And comparing today's superintendent contract to an old teacher salary schedule wouldn't tell us much about how an entire district allocated salary dollars anyway.
So I went looking for something better. And I found it in the National Center for Education Statistics' F-33 School District Finance Survey.
Same dataset.
Same districts.
Same years.
Same enrollment denominator.
That lets us ask a slightly different, and I think much better question:
For every student a district served, how did its spending on teacher salaries change compared with its spending on administrative salaries?
I randomly selected 15 Michigan districts from different parts of the state and compared FY2015 with FY2023.
For teachers, I combined the NCES salary expenditure categories for regular education, special education, vocational education and other educational programs.
For administration, I combined General Administration and School Administration—the functions covering district-level administration and school administration.
Then I divided each by district enrollment. And that produced the ledger you see below.
A positive Admin–Teacher Gap means administrative salary spending per pupil grew faster than teacher salary spending per pupil.
A negative gap means teacher salary spending per pupil grew faster.
And there are examples of both.
In Lansing, teacher salary spending per pupil was essentially flat at -0.4%, while administrative salary spending per pupil increased 35.0%.
In Jackson, the comparison was +13.7% teachers versus +46.9% administration.
But look at Bay City.
Teacher salary spending per pupil increased 44.5%, compared with 19.5% for administration.
Troy, Warren Consolidated, Portage and River Rouge also landed on the other side of the ledger.
That's important. Because I'm not interested in designing a calculation that produces the answer I expected to find. I'm interested in the calculation producing the answer.
And across these 15 districts, the answers are very different.
Ten had administrative salary spending per pupil grow faster than teacher salary spending per pupil.
Five had teacher salary spending grow faster.
So now I have another question.
Teachers have bargaining units specifically tasked with negotiating wages, benefits and working conditions. Administrative compensation is handled separately.
If the purpose of collective bargaining is to give employees greater negotiating power at the table, why did teacher salary spending per student fall behind administrative salary spending in two-thirds of this sample?
Maybe there are perfectly reasonable explanations.
Changes in staffing matter. Enrollment matters. District finances matter. Bargaining priorities matter. The number and type of administrative positions matter.
And importantly, this chart does not say individual administrators received these percentage raises. It measures how much districts spent on salaries within these functions per student.
That's why I didn't start with individual names. I started with the ledger. Now that the numbers have shown us where the largest gaps are, we can start opening the contracts and asking why.
Because sometimes the most interesting thing in a ledger isn't the answer.
It's the question the numbers leave behind.
📚 Source: National Center for Education Statistics, F-33 School District Finance Survey, FY2015 & FY2023.
Teacher salary expenditures: Z35 + Z36 + Z37 + Z38
Administrative salary expenditures: V15 + V17
With receipts and respect. 👑📜
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