Friday, March 27, 2015

STL County Superintendent Salary Comparisons

TLDR

Too Long, Didn't Read: Webster Groves pays its superintendent less than most neighboring districts both in terms of real dollars and when normalizing for student population.

Bias

I support Propositions S and W. I own two homes in the Webster Groves school district, so I will be doubly affected by this property tax increase.

Investigation

A Facebook commenter on my last post pointed me to a terrific KSDK story that lists nearly all the superintendent salaries in Missouri.

Below is are graphs of all of the available superintendent salaries of the profiled districts in yesterday's post (Clayton's superintendent's salary wasn't listed in the KSDK story); the student populations; and the salary/student ratio.





Analysis

The KSDK story implies that Webster Groves' superintendent is overpaid because she manages a much smaller district than (4,568) than St. Louis City (27,017), yet makes a comparable salary: $200,000 (Webster Groves) vs $225,004 (St. Louis City). However, it's important to distinguish between the performance of the two districts. St. Louis City is only provisionally accredited, while Webster Groves is a consistently high performing district.

Given that district performance should be controlled in this analysis, we'll ignore Normandy's ratio as well, since that district lost it's accreditation last year. Thus, Kirkwood ($44.62/student), Ladue ($44.06/student), and Webster Groves ($43.78/student) all have a very similar pay scale. Lindbergh gets a better value for its superintendent at ($39.48/student). 

This metric is probably a poor one for measuring actual superintendent value, but it is easy to understand, so people are likely to reference it. Still, it is encouraging that Webster Groves doesn't overpay its superintendent either in real dollars (3rd out of 4), nor in terms of dollars/student (3rd out of 4).

Thursday, March 26, 2015

St. Louis County Teacher Salary Schedules

TLDR

Too Long, Didn't Read: Most Webster Groves teachers with between 7 and 16 years of service have the best or second-best salary in the profiled St. Louis County school districts. Webster Groves teachers with the most experience and education make the 3rd highest salary, around $6000/year less than the best districts. If these are Webster Groves' best teachers, then they deserve to be closer to the highest salary.

Bias

I support Propositions S and W. I own two homes in the Webster Groves school district, so I will be doubly affected by this property tax increase.

Claim

The Supporting Webster Schools website outlines the following arguments for increasing teachers' salary in the Webster Groves School District:
Today [Webster Groves teachers are] compensated with salaries at or above the St. Louis County average.
The WGSD purposeful and strategic commitment is to keep our teacher pay at or above county median.

Investigation

I've created a spreadsheet of the latest publicly available salary schedules from Webster Groves, Kirkwood, Clayton, Lindbergh, Ladue, and Normandy schools. I graphed the data according to the following rules:

  • I assumed all salary step categories corresponded to years of service (even though Lindbergh and Normandy say salary step categories don't necessarily reflect years of service).
  • If no salary was specified for a given year+degree+credit hour triplet, the salary for the closest year with the same degree+credit hour was assumed
  • Ladue and Normandy used 2013/2014 Salaries (the latest available) while Webster Groves, Kirkwood, Clayton, and Lindbergh used 2014/2015
  • When a district doesn't specify an equivalent degree+credit hour category, the highest degree+credit hour category less than the current category was used. For example, Webster Groves, Lindbergh, and Ladue have no MA+15 category, so their MA category was matched against Kirkwood, Clayton, and Normandy's MA+15 category.

Facts

This yields the following graphs:
BA

BA+15
BA+30
MA
MA+15
MA+30
MA+35
MA+50
PhD/EdD

Webster Groves pays the highest salary for

  • 4 years and a BA
  • [4,10] years and a BA+15 or BA+30
  • [3,17] years and an MA
  • [8,11], [13,17] years and an MA+15
  • [7,17] years and an MA+30
  • [9,19] years and an MA+50
  • [7,10], [12,16] years and a PhD

Analysis

There is far too much variance to deal with average salaries. Anyone that talks about an average salary is trying to hide the truth. There is no truth in an average teacher salary. There are 9 different pay scales just among the 6 profiled school districts, and each pay scale has a highly inconsistent growth rate.
If the best teachers are those with the most education and most years of experience, then Webster is underpaying compared to its peers. It's best teachers by this metric make around $6000 less than the highest salary.