This is bogus…cite this (and it is probably Goldwater Institute “research”).

I am not a member of the AEA…nor do I know anyone that “feeds” me anything of the sort.

Last, any increases in education in recent years were not 41%!!! and were after cuts…and were off of an already low (among the lowest in the country) spending base. The cuts in 2001 took their toll on an already strapped system…the Gov and your legislature gave some of that back and tried to move us from the low 40s in state rankings up. It worked…and now we are moving backwards again…and at much more than a 2% rate.

Universities took a huge cut in state funds last year, midyear cuts, and are about to take another $20 million (another 5-6% cut in state funds).

We are going backwards…and off of what was already a backwards system.

And you all wont even pay a cent more per dollar in taxes to help get us competitive. Pathetic. This will be so easy to sell in the next election.

Nice AEA hyperbole, but you ignore the facts.

The legislature increased funding by 41+% over the last four years then reduced that increase by 2% in the worst economy this state has seen with revenues down by more than 40%.

During the last six years, we increased funding by over 67%, added a designated increase in sales taxes, added the Indian Gaming money, added the largest increase in State Land Sales in history, saw the schools income from property taxes skyrocket. With those unquestioned facts in mind, the schools spent that money in a way that INCREASED the student/teacher ratio, added the number of administrators by nearly 30%, increased Superintendents salaries by 49%, reduced spending for gifted students.

Under that crazy situation, we had to dumb down the AIMS test every year because we achieved worse results in outcomes. That is because all of the increased funding went to the adults – mostly outside of the classroom – while programs and services to our students were starved in the middle of an abundance of cash – the schools have over 2 BILLION dollars in unspent carryover funds on their balance sheets.

If the legislature would even consider raising taxes with 2 BILLION unused money in a Rainy Day Fund, you would be outraged. Somehow, the educrats have many convinced that the system is honorable and trustworthy. Bernie Madoff will contact you soon to sell you some investment portfolios – from his new diggs in North Carolina.

I don’t know what the optimal mix is for administration, but the truth is that you need people to run schools like you do any business. You need people to budget, do finance, do personnel, manage curriculum, and to fullfill the now hundreds and hundreds of regulatory demands placed on them (just like businesses do).

Some might argue that schools are not as effective as they can be because of a need for a qualified and excellent set of school administrators.

I am not arguing that it needs to be 90% administrator to teacher…that silly…but the figures I typically here is that there is a relatively small amount of administration in most schools. Even if you cut some of them, you would still not get at the kind of budget money that is generated per student or per whatever formula we are judged on nationally.

Judging nationally, our schools are among the poorest funded. We are not among the best in outcome either. There IS a correlation there…and cutting more aint going to make it any better.

You confuse me. You are complaining that you believe the administration at TUSD is inappropriately spending too much on central administration.

I supply the actual figures that were reported by TUSD that says they increased administrators by over 33% over the last four years while student population has decreased by 4.4% and you argue that the figures are imprecise because they are aggregate? I don’t know how you can get any more precise than using the self-reported data on their annual report.

I’m beginning to think that you spent too much time in the environs of higher education and have become inured with circular illogic. I was merely trying to provide you with specific data that proved what you said you believed anecdotally.

Have a good day and God Bless

I have worked in an admiistrative position for an Arizona college many years ago and am familiar with many of the budgetary tricks which make aggregate analysis imprecise.

In addition, the teachers around the district understandably detest the administrators at 1010 for good reason.

What we need to do is look at where the money is spent rather than fixating on the per student or teacher aggregate spending.

A couple of areas at TUSD which are seriously underfunded (to make money available for district administrators) are library funds and computer funds.

Things are actually worse in most other districts across the state. The overall increase in state spending for district schools increased by over 40% during those four years with only a 10.6% increase of students during the same time period.

The aggregate comes from the self-reported information supplied from each school district in the state. The only reason we get this information is that they are required by law to provide it and the department has placed it on line.

Any person can go in and look at the last reported figures – FY2008 – and compare the individual district with any other district, county, or statewide figures. You can also go back to previous fiscal year reports and do a comparative analysis.

I recommend that you do not go back any further than FY2004 due only to the fact that the form was substantially changed that year and, except for where different items appear on the page, the information on the form has remained the same since 2004.

To your specific district of concern, over the last four years for TUSD, the total state funding to the district increased by 20.8 percent, the student population decreased by 4.4%, the per student funding increased by 26.2%. The number of administrators increased by 33.13% while the number of teachers increased by only 3.1%. The number of administrators were increased ten times more than teachers PLUS the salaries of administrators grew disproportionately making the problem even worse.

Reducing the costs of the hogs at 1010 would allow us to spend MORE money on real education programs without increasing taxes.

While I hope that things aren’t as bad elsewhere in the state as in Tucson, it seems to me that aggregate analysis of expenditures is misleading, to put it mildly.

The number of FTEs is important because it takes into account part time teachers, movement of different teachers in and out of the district during the year, any increase or decrease of staff during the year, etc.

So if you take four teachers who are working 1/4 of the year and two teachers working 1/2 of the year (or day) the sum would be 2 FTE’s. No matter the split of hours to different personnel, all hours paid to certified teachers are combined then divided using the total school hours per year to get the FTEs.

Therefore, dividing the FTEs into the gross pay for the year ($2,658,120,402. total teacher pay divided by 53,883 FTEs) is how anyone would get to the figure of $49,331.

On page I-264 there is a summary of all school districts. This summary states that total teacher salaries are $2,658,120,402 (in line Year End Teachers Salaries) and also states that Year End FTE for teachers is 53,883.49. I assume the numbers you are using is only for a specific district. Maybe you could reference where you are getting info because the $117,504,889 you give for total teachers salary is clearly only for a small portion of teachers, perhaps for one district.

As I said, in the report I am looking at, total teacher salaries for the state are $2,658,120,402. Certified FTE for teachers is 53,883.49 and Year End Teacher FTE is 57,774.69 .

Certified teacher FTE is from OCtober 1 2007. Year-End Teacher FTE is from last day of report for FY 2007-2008. No “average number of teachers” calculation.

Since you have been so patronizing and accusing me of not being able to do simple math or read a report, I would ask that you state exactly where your numbers are coming from so I can see what the definition of terms being used are.

Now as to this:
“The districts reported the number of teachers (sum of that element)and the sum of their salaries (sum of that element) in their individual SAFR reports. I got to the average (mean) salary by dividing element 1 into element 2. ”

No, you are not understanding. The salaries are pay for all people who worked any time during the fiscal year. The number of teachers at some point in time does not give you enough information to compute the average teacher salary.

Here is a simple example. Suppose one knew the total number of membership fees a club collected over the year. For some reason, different people had different dues and you wanted to compute the average membership fee paid. Knowing the number of members in a given month would not allow you to compute the average fee because this number may change from month to month as people leave or new people join or people lapse membership for a month. Now if you knew the monthly total for the same month you might be able to say something about average fees, but knowing the total fees for the year you is not going to be a good number to use because of the yearly variability. I don’t know how much more I can do in trying to explain this. If anyone else can lend a hand please do.

Taking this into consideration for you to continue to argue that the answer is something else is counter-intuitive.