Your Kids Are Nothing More Than a Revenue Stream in a Jobs Program for Adults

With a captive audience, guaranteed revenue, and increased funding for poor performance, public schools have little incentive to ensure any child learns.

This series explores the most compelling reasons you have to declare independence from the peculiar institution of American government schooling and make significant life changes to ensure your kids get a real education, something American public schools no longer provide, if they every did. These essays are based on my observations and thousands of conversations with students aged 13-18 and their families over the span of my 20-year career teaching in government-run schools in California.

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There’s an enormous disconnect between what parents think public schools do and what the system actually supports. People believe schools exist to educate kids.

They don’t.

Like so many other systems run by the government, public schools exist to perpetuate themselves and increase their power. They do this by employing people who will vote as a bloc to ensure their continued employment and, thus, the system’s growth.

I’ve experienced twenty years of relentless and purposeful mission creep as a teacher in three large suburban school districts in densely-populated California metros.

The California Department of Education says it spent $16,881 per pupil in the 2020-21 school year, 282% more than the $6,036 they spent per student in 2000.¹

The three districts I worked in averaged 33 students per classroom, so the typical 2020 classroom was worth about $557,000 in revenue to a school district. 

I made good money as a public school teacher. In 2020, my total compensation was roughly $132,000. My pay accounted for 24% of the $557,000 in revenue per classroom in California; note that a new teacher would cost half as much as I do.

Take 24% of the $16,881 spent on each California student and you get my pay per kid: $4051. That means $12,878 per student — a huge chunk of change and 76% of student funding — went elsewhere.

So where is all that money going?

As you can see from the graph above, teacher growth tracked the increase in students at 8%, which makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is the massive increase in non-teaching staff.

Principals and administrative staff are ostensibly hired to support teachers in the school’s primary role of instructing children.

They’re also really expensive.

At my single school site in 2020, we had a principal that cost $201,000 and $564,000 worth of Assistant Principals. We spent over three quarters of a million dollars on 4 people who don’t teach.

Our counseling staff costs the school $610,000 annually. Your child will be lucky to see her counselor once a year. These people also don’t teach.

Then you have the “administrative staff”. At my site in 2020, there were 11 clerical staff in the front office. With median compensation pushing $70,000, my site spent over $750,000 on them. That’s one school. There are over 30 in the district. Administrative staff are not licensed to teach.

Then there’s the District Office where there are zero students, but which employs hundreds of clerical workers, compliance officers, and other support staff. A junior secretary at the District Office earned $84,000 in compensation, while more senior administrative assistants pulled down over $100,000 in total compensation, more than many teachers make.

There were also two dozen Teachers on Special Assignment earning median total compensation of $124,000. TOSAs generally are paid to do work Directors and Superintendents and Principals should be doing, like observing and supporting instruction. Usually, TOSAs are well-respected, effective teachers who would be in a classroom instead of making slide decks and attending meetings if they hadn’t been promoted away from your kids.

Then you have the the district office bigwigs.

Their earnings are jaw-dropping, considering how few of their luxury cars are in the parking lot by the time I, a lowly front-line teacher, am able to get there for after-school meetings at 3:30 pm.

There are 13 directors in the district office. The median compensation for this group was $184,000. Their total compensation as a group was $1,900,000.

We have seven superintendents with 210-day contracts (30 vacation days and 10 sick days is the contract norm) working what seem to be very flexible hours.

They were paid $2,100,000 in 2020.

Until I sat down with a large CSV file courtesy of Transparent California and broke the labor spending out, even I didn’t know how it flowed to teaching vs. non-teaching staff. Here’s what I found.

The district paid all teachers and teacher’s aides slightly less than $132,000,000 in the 2020 school year.

The district paid its non-teaching staff over $67,000,000.

That means an absolutely mind-bending 34% of the dollars spent on labor in our suburban district went to people who have nothing to do with the day-to-day instruction of kids.

McKinsey and Company, one of the most successful and oldest American consulting firms, offers perspective on how education stacks up against other national industries. McKinsey shared the following data about General and Administrative costs across the largest industries in America.

The lowest performing firms in the poorest performing category, financial services, spent on average less than 11% on administrative and general costs.

Our district spent 34%, more than triple that amount, on administrative labor alone.

Anyone running a business, for-profit or not, would break out in hives at overhead consuming 34% of revenue.

Hold on, though. Many of these people are highly-trained, long-schooled educators. Surely they add value! Their swiftly increasing numbers and high-pay must result in large student gains in literacy and numeracy, right?

You be the judge.

The data above is from NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress for the state of California. From their website: “[NAEP] is the largest continuing and nationally representative assessment of what our nation's students know and can do in select subjects. It was first administered in 1969 to measure student achievement nationally. Teachers, principals, parents, policymakers, and researchers all use NAEP results to assess progress and develop ways to improve education in the United States.”

From 2000-2019, California moved from 20% proficient to 30% proficient in reading by 8th grade. Nearly tripling spending on schools helped 10% more 13-year-olds read at grade level.

Unfortunately, this leaves us with 70% of 8th graders who cannot read well, if at all. And we’re talking about 13-year-olds here, kids who’ve been in school for nine years.

NINE YEARS.

The math numbers are worse. We’ve moved from 17% proficient to 29% proficient in math. 71% of all 8th graders still lack basic numeracy. And basic numeracy is all they’re measuring on a math test for 8th graders; we’re not talking Calculus here.

Across this state alone, huge sums of money are being paid to increasing numbers of people whose work has little impact on the basic skills parents are sending their children to school to gain. Instead, these people spend their days jawboning the next new idea (which will be research-based, but almost certainly not evidence-based). Every new idea presented in the classroom takes time away from tried and true instructional practices that inculcate knowledge and actually result in real growth in literacy and numeracy.

Bureaucratic systems have one goal: growth. Every government system finds ways to increase the scope of its work — its territory, per se — which increases its power.

The K12 school system has enormous cover to enlarge its mission. When school leaders say they need an army of workers to ensure kids are learning in school, most people won’t blink an eye.

Families are also cost-insensitive. They don’t make basic return on investment calculations because the cost of schooling is borne by millions of people through taxation. They believe more school spending will make kids more knowledgeable, literate, and numerate, but NAEP says otherwise, the kids say otherwise, and thousands of college professors and business owners say otherwise too.

American families don’t understand the profound disconnect between education spending and how many actual dollars end up in their children’s classrooms. If increased personnel spending meant hiring more classroom teachers at all levels, we might see larger improvement. But the graph above clearly shows that increased education funding is supporting a class of extremely well-paid workers who have little to do with your child’s academic achievement.

In the past, these highly-paid workers have mostly just been ineffective. The ideas and policies they champion now are arguably harmful.

We’re hiring more expensive administrative staff and high-paid consultants (with questionable CVs) to implement Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies to teach kids that their immutable characteristics are inherently good or inherently bad. We’re paying people to develop Social-Emotional Learning curricula and surveys that track students’ mental health, labels them, can result in them missing instruction for further evaluations and can even put parents on the radar of Child Protective Services. We’re labeling any challenge a child faces in life “trauma”, then lowering the bar for kids who fall under that umbrella so that we almost certainly ensure that they won’t learn how to overcome, or even that it’s possible. We’re hiring an army of psychologists to treat kids who continually disrupt the learning environment so they can be “restored” to the classroom, much to the detriment of the other 32 kids there.

Meanwhile, we have state graduation rates pushing 90%, even if the kids parading across the football field in caps and gowns are functionally illiterate and can’t multiply two-digit integers.

The people in charge will continue to do more of what they’ve been doing since 2000: expanding the mission of schools. This upcoming school year, California plans to spend over $23,000 per student. District leaders will hire even more people and contract with ever more consultants to provide all kinds of ancillary services, but the vast majority of kids in my state still won’t have the basics of reading and math down.

No one will be held accountable if student outcomes don’t improve. State legislators, lobbied by the Teacher’s Union, will continue to increase funding to grapple with the illiteracy and innumeracy crippling ever more young lives. University graduate schools of education will find other social problems for schools to solve and district leadership will hire more people with the requisite state-issued credentials to look into it.

But my guess is that the numbers of functionally illiterate and innumerate students won’t improve materially. If they did, the system and all the union jobs and lobbying dollars and consulting contracts would shrink.

And when you’re bringing home close to $400,000 working a 210-day, flex-hour contract with very little accountability, your best interests lie not in insisting on evidence-based instructional practices and strict maintenance of academic discipline, but in ensuring that you, all the people on the District payroll, and all the consultants you contract with tackle an ever-increasing list of social issues tangential to learning.

After all, it’s for the children.

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The Dissident Teacher is an actual classroom teacher, and the stories shared by DT here are true. Ask any California kid in a PreK-12 California public school; he’ll tell you. 

1. A note on inflation: using an inflation calculator, $16,881 in 2020 was worth $11,231 dollars in 2000. 2020 K12 spending was 186% of 2000 K12 spending, inflation-adjusted. I felt it was necessary to footnote this, even though my analysis hinges on where the money is flowing rather than the amount by which spending has grown.