Let’s see, approximately 1,000 school districts in the state… so if we merge HALF of them out of existence, on average, we would save about $77,304,500 in superintendent salaries each year, not counting benefits I assume. There’s a start!
Yeah that is the way it would appear. As we know appearances are often deceiving. Often if you increase the size of the district, administrative cost increase disproportionately. Why, because they are hidden, and something called administrational inefficiency shows up. As districts become smaller management becomes more obvious, and the problems are on a scale that people can tackle. By your logic we should get rid of all districts and have one state system. Hmmmmm. Why do I believe that this is a bad idea?
@KyleSamuels — I truly can think of no cases in which increasing the size of a district disproportionally increases the per-pupil cost of administration, because of economies of scale. In fact, because each district has fixed costs, and these would be distributed over a greater number of pupils, the average per-pupil cost would likely decrease. It may even be that the per-pupil cost of such administrative tasks as payroll, purchasing, insurance, etc. would be less costly for a single, merged district than if these activities were administered separately for 1,000 districts. That is, these services might be more efficiently provided centrally. (This is the rationale behind the existence of county offices of education.)
The problem with the centralized model is not so much efficiency (the extent to which a task is accomplished in the least-costly manner) but rather effectiveness (the extent to which the completion of the task achieves the desired outcome). A major part of administration is governance and decisionmaking, which runs from the school board, through the superintendent and district staff, down to site principals. Trying to address all of each district’s problems through a single ”school board in the sky”/state administrative entity would result in an extraordinarily ineffective “one size fits all” approach.
I think that both you and Mr. Leyva are arguing your positions based on extremes at both ends of a spectrum, neither one of which is realistic. As noted, there are legitimate reasons — apart from management costs — for rejecting a single school district approach. Similarly, it is probably unrealistic to assume that we can merge out of existence 500 school districts. Having said this, I think that there is lots of room between these two extremes to come up with more reasonable proposals.
Finally, in Mr. Leyva’s defense, the vast majority of districts are very small (I can’t remember the exact figure, but I think it’s around 500 ADA). Many — if not most — of these are adjacent to other small districts). Merging the districts would eliminate duplicate administration (as it relates to governance) and could also yield savings in the provision of other administrative service because of economies of scale. Yet, the residents of each district typically fight to the death any such merger, because each wants to be in charge of its own business. In the absence of any fiscal incentives to do otherwise, the status quo will likely prevail.
If we were to consolidate districts, smaller districts would merge with bigger districts. Most smaller districts (except for several in the Bay Area) have low superintendent salaries – nowhere near the average. So, it does not follow to multiply by the average superintendent salary because you’re taking away from the low salaries and not taking away from the higher salaries – the salaries of Ray Cortines in LAUSD or Bill Kowba in SDUSD or Jonathan Raymond in SCUSD are still going to be as high as they are now.
Secondarily, many of the school districts in CA are one school districts with a superintendent/principal. If that districts like those consolidate with bigger districts, the superintendent/principal would still be principal. For example Petaluma City Schools is surrounded by 5-6 smaller 1 school districts. If those districts consolidated with PCS, there S/P would still be the principal. While their salary may go down a little – they would still be paid a principal salary. Administrative costs would be null – especially after the money spent seeing if consoldation is logical.
Boy those admin. salaries are reaching poverty status compared to the Beverly hills Admin who made $ 5.2 million dollars since 2006 to 2009. And how about the LA Times claiming a $45 Million study on “Measures of Effective Teaching”. Think that monies could have been wasted. Guess it’s small beans compared to President Obama give out another $4.5 Billion for free school lunches and now dinners. Seems taxpayers are feeding other peoples kids 3 meals a day, where are the parents responsibily to raise and pay for their children? Not us taxpayers without children, if were paying for their food we should have a say as to what they eat!
Actually, I think there is a good argument for greatly consolidating school districts in California. I suggest something on the order of one district per 50,000 students, about 130 for the present student populations. This would eliminate about 90 percent of school districts we currently have, more if charter schools had to use the “professional services” of a district. I would suggest this would also go a long way to insuring more equitable funding of schools as well.
Primarily the functions of the districts should revolve around fiscal, data, personnel, legal, and physical plant issue. Consolidating districts for these purposes would greatly reduce the time spent recruiting, hiring, and processing new personal, provide a more sophisticated leval staff to support technology and data management needs, and better coordinate investment in facilities over a greater area, also leading to savings. There would also be fewer different pay scales for teachers, and a billion hours a year would be saved on negotiations.Note I did not include curriculum and instruction. This would allow principals to focus on running there schools and improving instruction. Since most parents want to be more involved in education, parent councils, rather than elected school boards would provide the local control elements with respect to curriculum and instruction.
This won’t happen because 1) People with money want to be able to spend more their schools and, 2) school boards are pre-kindergarten for polliticians (pre-city council). The loss of the opportunity to run for so many offices would be heart breaking.
The recent contract for Alameda Unified School District’s Superintendent is over twice the average. Better to look at median salary. When averages are used meaningful information gets lost.
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Let’s see, approximately 1,000 school districts in the state… so if we merge HALF of them out of existence, on average, we would save about $77,304,500 in superintendent salaries each year, not counting benefits I assume. There’s a start!
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Yeah that is the way it would appear. As we know appearances are often deceiving. Often if you increase the size of the district, administrative cost increase disproportionately. Why, because they are hidden, and something called administrational inefficiency shows up. As districts become smaller management becomes more obvious, and the problems are on a scale that people can tackle. By your logic we should get rid of all districts and have one state system. Hmmmmm. Why do I believe that this is a bad idea?
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
@KyleSamuels — I truly can think of no cases in which increasing the size of a district disproportionally increases the per-pupil cost of administration, because of economies of scale. In fact, because each district has fixed costs, and these would be distributed over a greater number of pupils, the average per-pupil cost would likely decrease. It may even be that the per-pupil cost of such administrative tasks as payroll, purchasing, insurance, etc. would be less costly for a single, merged district than if these activities were administered separately for 1,000 districts. That is, these services might be more efficiently provided centrally. (This is the rationale behind the existence of county offices of education.)
The problem with the centralized model is not so much efficiency (the extent to which a task is accomplished in the least-costly manner) but rather effectiveness (the extent to which the completion of the task achieves the desired outcome). A major part of administration is governance and decisionmaking, which runs from the school board, through the superintendent and district staff, down to site principals. Trying to address all of each district’s problems through a single ”school board in the sky”/state administrative entity would result in an extraordinarily ineffective “one size fits all” approach.
I think that both you and Mr. Leyva are arguing your positions based on extremes at both ends of a spectrum, neither one of which is realistic. As noted, there are legitimate reasons — apart from management costs — for rejecting a single school district approach. Similarly, it is probably unrealistic to assume that we can merge out of existence 500 school districts. Having said this, I think that there is lots of room between these two extremes to come up with more reasonable proposals.
Finally, in Mr. Leyva’s defense, the vast majority of districts are very small (I can’t remember the exact figure, but I think it’s around 500 ADA). Many — if not most — of these are adjacent to other small districts). Merging the districts would eliminate duplicate administration (as it relates to governance) and could also yield savings in the provision of other administrative service because of economies of scale. Yet, the residents of each district typically fight to the death any such merger, because each wants to be in charge of its own business. In the absence of any fiscal incentives to do otherwise, the status quo will likely prevail.
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Pardon me — that should be Leyba, not Leyva.
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John Leyba’s logic is flawed.
If we were to consolidate districts, smaller districts would merge with bigger districts. Most smaller districts (except for several in the Bay Area) have low superintendent salaries – nowhere near the average. So, it does not follow to multiply by the average superintendent salary because you’re taking away from the low salaries and not taking away from the higher salaries – the salaries of Ray Cortines in LAUSD or Bill Kowba in SDUSD or Jonathan Raymond in SCUSD are still going to be as high as they are now.
Secondarily, many of the school districts in CA are one school districts with a superintendent/principal. If that districts like those consolidate with bigger districts, the superintendent/principal would still be principal. For example Petaluma City Schools is surrounded by 5-6 smaller 1 school districts. If those districts consolidated with PCS, there S/P would still be the principal. While their salary may go down a little – they would still be paid a principal salary. Administrative costs would be null – especially after the money spent seeing if consoldation is logical.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
Boy those admin. salaries are reaching poverty status compared to the Beverly hills Admin who made $ 5.2 million dollars since 2006 to 2009. And how about the LA Times claiming a $45 Million study on “Measures of Effective Teaching”. Think that monies could have been wasted. Guess it’s small beans compared to President Obama give out another $4.5 Billion for free school lunches and now dinners. Seems taxpayers are feeding other peoples kids 3 meals a day, where are the parents responsibily to raise and pay for their children? Not us taxpayers without children, if were paying for their food we should have a say as to what they eat!
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
Actually, I think there is a good argument for greatly consolidating school districts in California. I suggest something on the order of one district per 50,000 students, about 130 for the present student populations. This would eliminate about 90 percent of school districts we currently have, more if charter schools had to use the “professional services” of a district. I would suggest this would also go a long way to insuring more equitable funding of schools as well.
Primarily the functions of the districts should revolve around fiscal, data, personnel, legal, and physical plant issue. Consolidating districts for these purposes would greatly reduce the time spent recruiting, hiring, and processing new personal, provide a more sophisticated leval staff to support technology and data management needs, and better coordinate investment in facilities over a greater area, also leading to savings. There would also be fewer different pay scales for teachers, and a billion hours a year would be saved on negotiations.Note I did not include curriculum and instruction. This would allow principals to focus on running there schools and improving instruction. Since most parents want to be more involved in education, parent councils, rather than elected school boards would provide the local control elements with respect to curriculum and instruction.
This won’t happen because 1) People with money want to be able to spend more their schools and, 2) school boards are pre-kindergarten for polliticians (pre-city council). The loss of the opportunity to run for so many offices would be heart breaking.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
The recent contract for Alameda Unified School District’s Superintendent is over twice the average. Better to look at median salary. When averages are used meaningful information gets lost.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity