A Program We Can't Afford: The State Funded Internship for Principals

Recently, when the Office of Financial Management released their Priorities of Government report detailing what they thought should and should not be funded in the coming legislative session, one of the lowest priority items for education spending was the state funded Education Leadership Intern Program which provides a grant for paid release days for aspiring principals and superintendents to step out of the classroom and spend time working on their internships.

To my mind, cutting the program is the right thing to do when we're looking at a $6 billion dollar budget hole. There's no evidence that I've seen that Washington State has a principals shortage; similarly, I've yet to hear of a district unable to find a superintendent. Sure, it only cost slightly more than $1.4 million dollars in the last bienium, but that's not really the point--if we're going to be looking at every program in an honest way, and if the Priorities of Government is to mean anything, then there's an awful lot more that should avoid the axe before the Internship Program.

Trick is, that hasn't stopped OSPI from posting the application for next year's grant program, even though the grant program isn't statuatory and could go away any time. The Association of Washington School Principals acknowledges this truth on their website, saying that the grant applications will be considered "null and void" should the program not be funded, but at the same time they've made it one of their legislative priorities for the coming session.

This seems like an easy cut. I kind of hate to see it go, since I got one of those grants last year, but it's the right thing to do.

The Salary Gap

Here’s a spin-off from the post I did yesterday looking at teacher and administrator salary averages over the last 35 years here in Washington State.

We’ve heard a lot in the past few years about how CEO salaries are outpacing those of the workers by an ungodly percentage; this article gives a good overview. I was curious to see if that applied on our level, too.

Here are the average salaries for central office administrators, principals, and teachers from 1973-1974 and the current school year:

	1973-1974	2007-2008
Central Office	$19,540	$101,475
Principals	$17,368	$92,103
Teachers	$11,295	$49,903

This table shows the teacher salary as a percentage of the central office and principal salaries for the two years above (teacher salary/other salary):

	Central Office	Principals
73-74	57.8%	65.03%
07-08	49.18%	54.18%

So what does it mean?

In 1973, the average teacher made about 58% of the salary of the average superintendent. This year, the average teacher makes less than half of the average supe.

In 1973 the average teacher made 65% of the average principal. Now it’s 54%.

You could argue, then, that teacher salaries have not kept pace with administrative salaries. You could argue further that, given how the state funds administration, that this means that local money is being poured into administrator salaries at an increasingly aggressive pace.

The argument that I’d get from WASA and AWSP is that we need to attract quality people to the principalship and beyond by offering a quality salary. I won’t disagree with the point, but if you’re an administrator it’s also not a very good argument to make because it’s so damnably easy to turn on its head: don’t we also need to attract good people into the classroom by offering them a competitive salary as well?

I don’t know if these numbers matter, or if I’m reading them correctly. I think there’s something there, but I’m not sure what.

Any thoughts?

Six Figures

The OSPI website is a fun place, depending on what kind of fun you’re looking for. It’s not Spitzerish fun; it’s not even Disneyland fun. It’s more like that sense of fun you feel when you open the dishwasher and see that it’s already been run so the dishes are clean and you can use those dishes for a few days and then worry about loading it again at some point in the future, and if you get lucky your wife or mother-in-law might do it!

Anyhow, poking around the site a few weeks back I came across this spreadsheet (Historical Comparison of Statewide School District Personnel Annualized Average Base Salaries) looking at trends in teacher pay in Washington State. It’s complete for teachers, administrators, and classified staff back to 1973-1974, and the patterns are pretty interesting.

• In the 1973-1974 school year there were about 32,700 teachers who made an average salary of $11,295. In 2007-2008 there are 54,000 teachers making an average of almost $50k a year.
  
  
• In 1973 there were 1,200 “central administrators” (I’m assuming that means superintendents; the page I have doesn’t define) making $19,540 a year. In 2007 there were 1,174 administrators making an average of $101,475.
  
  
• “Wait a minute,” I can hear you thinking, “there are less central administrators now than there were 35 years ago? That can’t be right!” I agree, given the rise of special ed directors, assistant superintendents, and the like, though I’d posit that the fact that there’s less school districts now than there were then could be an influence.
  
  
• Unit administrators (the principals) make an average of $92,103 a year, up from $17,368 in 1973.

Hooray for numbers!

The Joys of Leadership

In Hoquiam, the School Board's terrible evaluation of the school Superintendent made for a great newspaper article over the weekend.

The evaluation said the superintendent has a “shoot first and ask questions later” attitude, accused him of not respecting women in the workplace, described him as a micro-manager and said his leadership style is the equivalent of “Do what I say, not what I do.”

“There is no defending the negative issues presented in this evaluation,” it states. “Unfortunately, I think that these situations had a direct correlation on at least two board members and one business manager leaving,” one School Board member wrote.

And in another case of an internal matter getting out and getting messy, Burlington-Edison High School will soon be looking for a new principal after the Superintendent drove off the old one:

The disclosure came amid signs of conflict between VanderVeen and district Superintendent Rick Jones that emerged at a faculty and staff meeting at the high school Wednesday morning.

At the meeting, teachers report Jones as having said that VanderVeen had only one year left at the school because she refused to take a different job within the school district.

Jones initially denied that he had put a one-year timeline on VanderVeen’s tenure at the high school. But this morning, after hearing several teachers’ account of the meeting, he sent an email to staff members at the high school acknowledging the comment.

“I misspoke and I apologize for the confusion I caused,” Jones wrote in the email. “It was not my intent or that of the school board to quantify the time Beth would be at the school.”

“I totally had not intended for that to be the message,” Jones told the Skagit Valley Herald this morning. “In the emotion of things, I didn’t choose my words as appropriately as I should have.”

Elsewhere, Tacoma is narrowing down the field in its search for a new superintendent. Read the article, and also check out the surprisingly nice candidate profiles that the News Tribune did. A note to the field: this is pat on the back they use to find a place to put the knife.

Finally, there's the Aberdeen High School principal who was a leader on Friday, went home for the night, and turned in his letter of resignation on Saturday. When someone doesn't finish the year like that, you can assume there's a lot of inner turmoil going on.