Rise of bureaucracy

Has the public school system become a jobs program for administrators?

The perennial refrain regarding Minnesota’s public education system is that we must fully fund education and that teachers need more resources in the classroom. So, common sense says that the most important thing to spend education dollars on is a well-equipped, high-quality teacher for every classroom. But that’s not what we’re seeing. We keep pouring money into a system that seems to bleed it just as fast, with test and performance results that fall far short of the state’s historically premier reputation. One area experiencing significant growth is among the non-instructional jobs in Minnesota’s public school system, which can be linked to significant opportunity cost, impacting not only teaching but also learning.

Despite statewide public school enrollment declining for the past four consecutive years, Minnesota public schools have continued hiring non-teaching staff. Since fall 2019 (pre-COVID), the number of district administrative staff has ticked up just under four percent. Principal and assistant principal growth is up over seven percent. But public school enrollment has dropped just under three percent (2.6 percent) over the same time period.

Put simply, even as student populations are dropping, the state’s public school system has been increasing non-teaching staff.

Increases in school resources

Minnesota is a high-spending education state. Spending on E-12 public education is Minnesota’s biggest general fund expenditure. According to data from the Minnesota Office of Management and Budget, E-12 education spending for the 2024-2025 biennium makes up nearly 35 percent of all general fund dollars and is expected to push nearly 39 percent for the 2026-2027 biennium.

Indeed, Minnesota K-12 state revenue per student — adjusted for inflation — increased 31 percent from 2002 to 2020, based on calculations from Minnesota Department of Education data. Minnesota K-12 spending per student jumped 22 percent over that same time period.

Where is the biggest growth happening? Among administrative and nonteaching staff.

The growth in administrative staff and non-teaching positions has a long history. District administrative staff in Minnesota public schools is up over 132 percent (132.1 percent) since 2000, as calculated from data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) at the U.S. Department of Education. Principal and assistant principal growth over the same time period is up 50 percent. Compare those increases to student growth and teacher growth at two percent and five percent, respectively. One can analyze data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to find a similar story of administrative staffing growth far exceeding the pace of hiring classroom teachers and student enrollment growth.

It is important to note that the administrative staff category is a separate category from instructional aides, guidance counselors, librarians, school and library support staff, student support staff, and other support services staff.

District level administrative spending is also growing, slowly ticking up in the percentage it consumes — albeit still single digits — of total general fund expenditures, while the percent of expenditures on regular instruction slowly ticks down. Minnesota statewide spending on total district level administration is up 33 percent since fiscal year 2019, compared to 18 percent growth in spending on regular instruction.

And these non-teaching staff aren’t cheap. According to the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB), the average superintendent salary for the 2023-2024 school year was $158,188 — up 14.6 percent from the average of $137,977 during the 2019-2020 school year. The average middle school principal salary for the 2023-2024 school year came in at $134,542. The average teacher salary increased 3.5 percent from the 2019-2020 school year to the 2023-2024 school year, coming in at $72,430.

These positions also carry with them growing employee benefit debt costs that become big line items keeping new education dollars out of the classroom. The explosion in benefits costs is largely due to mounting debt in employee pension systems, which is in need of its own article to fully unpack, as the problems with Minnesota’s public pension system will continue to cause education dollars to evade classrooms if public pension problems aren’t addressed.

Student outcomes

Administrative staff and principals are ostensibly hired to support teachers, which could be why increasing the number of these positions doesn’t often raise red flags. But there is no evidence in the aggregate that increasing staffing improves student academic outcomes. In fact, students’ academic gains have not kept pace with these hiring trends.

The majority of Minnesota K-12 public school students are not meeting grade-level benchmarks in reading or math, as measured by 2024 achievement results on the state’s assessments, the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments. Minnesota student performance on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests is not significantly different from when it was last administered two years prior and is still below pre-COVID levels despite record levels of aid intended to address steep learning loss. The average scale score for fourth-grade reading is the lowest it has ever been since the test was first administered in 1992. Eighth graders’ average scale score for reading is also the lowest it has been since the test was first administered in 1998. The percentages of students scoring below basic reading levels are at all-time highs. Thirty-nine percent of fourth graders lack basic reading skills, the same as in 2022, and remains the highest percentage ever since the NAEP reading test was first administered. The percentage of eighth graders failing to meet basic reading achievement standards edged up to 29 percent, which is now the highest percentage ever for this grade level since the reading test was first administered.

Mandates and transparency

In the last two legislative sessions, the Minnesota Legislature approved historic education funding and billions in “new” state aid that had already been earmarked to several new mandates not tied to improving academic achievement. This undoubtedly applies pressure at the district level, requiring more administrative staff to comply with the new mandates, again taking resources away from effective teaching and learning.

Hiring additional administrators at the school or district level can help avoid compliance burdens either going unmet or falling unnecessarily on classroom teachers. But it is also important for school districts to be transparent with and accountable to their taxpayers that their hard-earned money is being spent wisely.

For example, the Minneapolis Public Schools district used non-recurring COVID recovery aid to add 400 jobs, despite years of shrinking enrollment. Reasonable people may disagree on the optimal ratio of administrators to teachers and administrators to students, but communicating why staffing decisions are being made the way they are and why non-instructional growth rates are far outpacing that of teachers and students is a reasonable place to start.

Opportunity costs

Notably, similar administrative growth can be observed nationally. Between 1950 and 2015, administrators and non-teaching staff increased by more than seven times the growth in student enrollment, according to an analysis by Kennesaw State University professor Ben Scafidi. Scafidi notes in his report “Back to the Staffing Surge” that it could be argued the staffing surge from the 1950s to the early 1990s was worth it because “during those decades public schools began welcoming students with special needs and were allowed to integrate by race or were actively integrated by government policies.”

But, he continues, the staffing surge’s prolongation after 1992 (considered the “modern staffing surge”) has “posed a tremendous opportunity cost on teachers and parents.” Inflation-adjusted per-student spending increased by 27 percent between fiscal years 1992 and 2014, yet real average salaries for public school teachers fell by two percent during this time period. For Minnesota, inflation-adjusted per-student spending increased 26 percent from FY 1992 to FY 2014, while average teacher salaries declined six percent.

There was a disproportionate growth in non-teachers compared to student and teacher growth, and it came with a hefty price tag.

Scafidi explains:

If the increase in “all other staff” alone had matched student enrollment growth between FY 1992 and FY 2015…then a cautious estimate finds American public schools would have saved almost $35 billion in annual recurring savings. That is $35 billion every single year from 1992 to 2015, for a cumulative total of $805 billion over this time period.

One thing public schools could have done with that recurring $35 billion: Give every teacher a permanent $11,100 raise. Another potential use of those funds: Give more than 4 million students $8,000 education savings accounts (ESAs) that could be used to offset tuition payments at private schools, to save for college, or to pay for other educational services, therapies, curriculum, and materials. What it boils down to: Dollars used to fund the public school staffing surge placed a significant opportunity cost that precluded raises for teachers and/or school choice opportunities for students.

And for Minnesota? Scafidi calculated about $1.4 billion in annual recurring savings that could go toward a $25,137 increase in teacher compensation. Or it would cover nearly 175,000 students receiving an $8,000 education savings account (ESA) to use toward a variety of educational expenses, such as tuition at a nonpublic school, special education therapies and services, and tutoring.

There are other examples where these dollars could be used. What about putting the dollars toward teacher pension funds so that we keep the promises made to future retirees?

The latest national data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that administrative staff increased by 95 percent between 2000 and 2022 — 19 times the rate of student enrollment growth. The number of principals and assistant principals grew by 39 percent. Teacher and student growth came in at 10 percent and five percent, respectively, over that same time period. Again, consider the opportunity cost at hand with the hiring of non-teachers at a rate above the increase in student enrollment.

Nationwide test results on NAEP cannot connect this staffing surge to measurable academic benefits for American public school students. On NAEP’s long-term trend assessments for 17-year-olds — an age that arguably reflects the culmination of a student’s public school career — national reading and math test scores declined between 1992 and 2012, the last year that age was given the longterm trend assessments.

Some may argue that extra public school staff are necessary because students have become more disadvantaged over recent decades. There is an alarming rise of fatherless homes in particular communities, which can be a contributing factor to lower student outcomes, and there should be urgency behind addressing it. But overall, according to Scafidi’s analysis of four empirical studies on the topic of whether American students have become more disadvantaged, “American public school students in recent years have, on balance, characteristics that are more favorable for positive student outcomes relative to public school students of decades ago” (i.e., higher family income, more educated parents, fewer children in the household).

Given the massive increase in public school personnel — well over and beyond what was needed to accommodate student enrollment growth — given the data on stagnant student achievement in public schools over time, and given that students in recent years have characteristics that are slightly more favorable for student achievement, the productivity of American public schools has fallen rather dramatically over the past few decades.

The disproportionate increases in public school staffing, particularly the growth in hiring non-teachers, carry noteworthy opportunity costs — on teachers, students, and taxpayers.

Such a pattern needs to be broken. Moving to a more student-based system is a promising possibility — a model that allows parents to direct resources allocated for their children to the educational setting that works best for them. Expanding educational choice programs yield better outcomes for students and teachers, and majorities of educators, families, and communities support prioritizing dollars following the student. It is an opportunity to break out of the cycle of bureaucracy that has not resulted in meaningful achievement change despite decades of time and costly spending.