The Mississippi Center for Public Policy has produced a “Fat Cat Report” of the 50 highest-paid public officials in the state. While the report clearly includes some valuable information about high salaries, a press release promoting the report also features some deeply flawed logic.
The most glaring example is the insistence to compare school superintendents’ pay with the governor’s $122,160 annual salary. The report found that superintendents accounted for almost half of the top 50 public salaries in the state, and their average salary of superintendents in the top 50 was $175,000 a year.
This is not to defend obvious overpayments from school boards who clearly have been too generous or too desperate. The superintendent in F-rated Holmes County, a district likely to be taken over by the state, gets $170,000 per year.
But using the governor’s salary as the measuring stick for school superintendent pay is a horrible idea. It ignores the fact that education professionals have plenty of options well beyond the Mississippi state line.
There’s only one governor’s office in Mississippi. And to occupy it, you need a strong history in this state. But there are thousands of public school districts across America looking for capable leaders, and there’s nothing to stop a superintendent in Mississippi from leaving this state for the same job elsewhere.
Comparing school superintendents’ pay to the governor’s pay just doesn’t make sense. That is a true apples-to-orange strategy.
The Center for Public Policy notes that capping all superintendents’ pay below what the governor makes would save $1.7 million a year, enough to hire 50 more teachers.
Fine, but if $122,160 is all that a superintendent can earn in Mississippi, it’s easy to predict that the best ones will be hitting the road quickly for states that have no such artificial limit on pay. Mississippi has enough trouble recruiting teachers. The state would be shooting itself in the foot if it made it more difficult to attract superintendents, too.
A better benchmark would be to compare the pay of Mississippi superintendents with those in other Southern states. It also would help to break down this information by student body size so that districts can compare their pay packages to others with similar-sized enrollments.
Again, it’s obvious that some districts are overpaying, and higher salaries do not always guarantee better performance. Another good example of imbalanced salaries is Tupelo, where the superintendent of the city’s 7,200-student system makes twice as much as the superintendent in DeSoto County, which has nearly five times more students than Tupelo.
If there is a concern about the pay of superintendents , it might be the annual raises that often are guaranteed in employment contracts. Someone who gets a 3% raise every year on a $100,000 salary will make nearly $116,000 in five years and $134,000 in 10 years.
Few workers get a 34% raise over a decade, and maybe superintendents shouldn’t, either.
