If our so-called age of austerity seems hard to swallow sometimes, that’s because our public-finance problems were built over a number of years, with a series of changes that seemed small at the time.
A percentage point here, a percentage point there, compounded over the course of a decade or two, and now when we try to make some changes we’re talking about real money.
Last Sunday, a story by the AJC’s Mark Niesse showed what that looks like in Atlanta Public Schools, which “never adjusted its management structure to fit its size after decades of decline in student enrollment.” By 2012, APS was spending almost three times as much per student on administration than other metro Atlanta systems. The difference would be enough to hire some 300 new teachers — or to return about $25 million each year to taxpayers.
That’s one way to look at the high price of personnel outside the classroom. Headcount is another.
Earlier this year, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice reported on the explosive growth of non-teaching staff across much of the country. The Indianapolis-based group, using federal data, found many states have seen the rate of growth of non-teachers — administrators, secretaries and the like — far outpace that of both students and teachers between 1994 and 2009.
One of those states is Georgia, which according to the group’s calculations had more than 22,000 more non-teachers in 2009 than it would have had if the number of non-teachers had merely grown at the same rate as students.
Put into dollars, using a very conservative estimate of $30,000 per employee for salaries and benefits, we’re talking about $665 million that year alone.
How much is $665 million in the context of state educational spending? In 2009, it represented about two times the amount of state “austerity” cuts for schools.
But wait, there’s more. The study stopped at 2009, the last year for which comparable data nationwide were available. However, if the savings were the same in each the following years, it would have been enough to offset about three-quarters of the state’s austerity cuts through 2013.
So it’s safe to say the budget cuts of the past few years would have been far easier to absorb had Georgia’s school districts kept administrative spending in check over the previous decade and a half.
But while APS spends more on administrative costs per student than any other school system in metro Atlanta, it’s not the region’s worst offender for “extra” non-teaching staff costs according to the Friedman Foundation’s methodology.
That, ahem, honor belongs to the school system in DeKalb County, where non-teaching staff grew more than twice as fast as student enrollment between 1994 and 2009. Using that modest estimate of $30,000 a head, DeKalb’s excessive administrative spending came out to $50.7 million in 2009.
Next on the list in terms of “extra” dollars spent?
- Gwinnett, at $47.7 million;
- Cobb, at $38.4 million;
- Muscogee, at $24.8 million;
- Fulton, at $21.1 million.
APS comes in “only” in 12th place, overspending by $13.8 million.
In each district, those dollars would have gone a long way toward avoiding furlough days, layoffs and shortened school years. And cutting that extra administrative spending wouldn’t have been so difficult if the growth hadn’t come so steadily during the good years.
When we get back to having good years, that’s something for elected officials to keep in mind.
