Of Interest

The Empire Center, the folks who bring you SeeThroughNY, published yesterday an analysis of the costs of K-12 public education in New York State: "What's driving K-12 school costs? (2015 update)." One data-based observation made is this: "As student enrollment declined and school staffing rose and fell between 2000-01 and 2013-2014, median salaries for teachers and non-teaching professionals increased by more than 40 percent. The growth continued even after school finances were hit by shockwaves of the Great Recession, which officially began in late 2007, and the global financial crisis, which set off a near panic on Wall Street in the fall of 2008." (As a point of interest, the median teacher salary in the Hudson City School District for 2013-2014 was $67,843.) The report concludes:

The full extent of the continuing rise in school spending since the recession was not inevitable or unavoidable. It was the result of (a) increasing teacher compensation costs driven largely by automatic pay raises, and (b) continued relatively high levels of staffing, relative to enrollment, especially in non-teaching titles. State law clearly is a major factor in the first trend, while the second needs to be more closely examined.

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