Susan Pendergrass speaks with Avery Frank, senior policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, and Cory Koedel, director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute, about their new report on staffing and enrollment trends in Missouri schools over the past 25 years. They discuss why teacher and administrator hiring has grown steadily even as student enrollment declines, what teachers could be earning if staffing levels had stayed flat, the shift in school spending from instruction to support services, whether pensions play a role in the hiring trend, and more.
Read the Report and Visit the Data Dashboard
Episode Transcript
Susan Pendergrass (00:02): We are once again gonna be doing a podcast on one of my favorite topics, which is not my favorite topic, actually, demographic changes happening in the state with kids and schools, and I certainly talk about it a lot, but Avery Frank and Cory Koedel are joining me to talk about a paper that you guys will be releasing soon that really puts this into pretty stark relief. Avery, if you could just give a quick summary of what this paper is and what your top line findings are.
Avery Frank (00:32): Well, this paper really was looking at what’s been going on with staffing and enrollment in the past twenty five years in Missouri. Because we know that some people have been saying we have a teacher shortage, and some people are concerned about enrollment. But we wanted to look at, okay, what’s actually the numbers saying about demographics in Missouri school districts. And what we found is generally that there’s a small percentage decrease in enrollment, so we have fewer students than we did 25 years ago. It’s been decreasing. It was a strong decrease after the pandemic. And teachers and administrators, their staffing levels have been steadily growing since 2000. It’s not been like a rapid climb one year. It’s been steadily growing since 2000. So we continue to hire more and more administrators and teachers for fewer students, and especially administrators. Administrators saw very strong growth since 2000.
Susan Pendergrass (01:30): So I wonder, Cory, I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been talking about it for a few years, and I just got off the radio talking about it, and there’s another article in the Wall Street Journal about it. I feel like this is a major policy conundrum, that ultimately we’re seeing a decline in the number of children, which is going to be one day a decline in the number of people in this country, and the school system should be reacting, but I don’t see a reaction, and I wonder what you think. Is this like, are we in this weird gray area where people are like, great, teacher-student ratios are going down and my son only has eight kids in his math class, this is such a great thing for me. Are we just in this weird in-between time where we’ve decided that this could possibly be a good thing?
Cory Koedel (02:15): Well, that’s a tricky question. I will say, for as long as I can remember, and back before I was born even, every year we just spend more and more on schools. The real dollars just go up and up and up, and that can’t last forever. And an issue that the report points out is that we’re just putting more and more personnel resources in schools, and it’s really just not matching, historically, what the need actually is that schools really have.
The other interesting thing that’s going on is there’s this trade-off between how many people we’re hiring and how much we’re paying them. And the report puts that in stark contrast as well. There’s a lot of talk about teacher shortages, as Avery mentioned, and low teacher pay. Well, there’s no teacher shortage in the sense that we have more teachers per student than ever before. So you can argue about pockets of shortage, and I know Avery has some other work on that, but in terms of the overall workforce, we have more teachers than ever. We seem to be choosing to keep hiring more and more teachers and administrators, as Avery mentioned, rather than pay these people more. And so when there’s polling, people say they want to pay teachers more, but what school districts do instead is they just hire more and more people. So if you think about that pot of money available for salaries as fungible, you can either spend more per teacher or hire more teachers, and we’re consistently choosing the latter.
Susan Pendergrass (03:40): Why do you think that is?
Cory Koedel (03:41): That is a tricky question. I don’t have a good answer for why that is. In the report we talk a little bit about possibilities. The best example I can think of is there’s this perception that students today are much needier than before, and we need more people there to help manage them. The reason I kind of struggle with that explanation is that the data aren’t really consistent with that being a driver of what’s happening, in the sense that when there’s been disruptions of student behavior, so you think about the rise of smartphones, it’s not like a bunch more people were hired right when that happened. We were hiring more people even before smartphones came along.
Common indicators of student disadvantage are related to poverty. Poverty is actually lower today than for most of this century, and there’s been this growth in adult bodies in the schools this whole time. So I don’t know the explanation. I don’t have a good explanation, unfortunately.
Susan Pendergrass (04:42): Yeah, I think about it a lot. And I wonder if twenty years from now we’re not gonna go back to some of the charts you put in this paper and just see this lag, right? So the personnel will just catch up to the number of kids. ‘Cause I just don’t think this current trend can continue indefinitely.
Cory Koedel (04:59): Yeah, I mean, they’ve been going on a long time. I mean, the difference
Susan Pendergrass (05:03): Yeah, mm-hmm.
Cory Koedel (05:05): now is enrollment starting to decline, right? The earlier, like say pre-2000, but we’re really showing the trends from 2000 onward. Pre-2000, this was also happening. So this is really a continuation of a very long-term trend. Before the turn of the century, enrollment was growing, and teachers and administrators were growing faster, but they were both growing. Now we have this weird new dynamic where the student enrollment part is starting to actually fall, and teachers and administrators are still growing. So it’s shifted a little bit, but it’s been going on a really long time. I agree with you, at some point the buck has to stop, but it hasn’t yet.
Susan Pendergrass (05:41): So Avery, I know this is in the paper, and I just want to mention that there’s also a great companion dashboard where you can look at district-level data, but if we had kept student-teacher ratios the same, if they were the same in twenty twenty five as they were in two thousand, how much more could we be paying each teacher?
Avery Frank (06:03): If we fixed it just for the teachers, so if we only did, okay, we’re gonna have the same amount of teachers in two thousand as we do today, which would still be a lower student-teacher ratio because we have fewer students.
Susan Pendergrass (06:14): That’s right. So just the same amount of teachers.
Avery Frank (06:18): If we just kept the same amount of teachers, sorry for the long-winded answer,
Susan Pendergrass (06:21): No, that’s fine.
Avery Frank (06:22): we’d be paid teachers about eight thousand dollars more, and that’s not including if we held administrators the same as well, which is a pretty significant pay
Susan Pendergrass (06:29): So what if we held administrators the same?
Avery Frank (06:31): raise for each teacher. That’d be an average teacher salary increase of eight thousand dollars, so some of course could have more or less.
Susan Pendergrass (06:39): So in other words, the budget wouldn’t go up. The budget would be the same. And at this time we know student growth was going up towards the beginning of the early two thousands, but not so much since then, and now it’s declining. So I understand what you’re saying with teacher-student ratio, but what if we kept administrators the same? How much would we be able to be paying each administrator?
Avery Frank (07:03): If we kept administrators the same, it’d be about a two thousand dollar raise if we kept them the same from two thousand. Now, of course, there would be some pushback on the fact that we’ve had some special education increases which have called for more administrators, or we’ve had some things that do require some administrators. So there is a little bit of reason for there to be growth in administrators, but still, it would still be a significant pay increase. What’s honestly surprising to me in this paper as well is that we don’t even have to go all the way back to 2000, because some people would be like, well, a lot’s changed in twenty-five years.
Susan Pendergrass (07:41): Yeah, yeah.
Avery Frank (07:42): A ton has changed in twenty-five years. But if you go back just to twenty fifteen, if we use the same amount of teachers from twenty fifteen, we would still get a three thousand dollar raise for teachers, which I’m sure a lot of teachers would love, a three thousand dollar raise to their salary. That’s a pretty big raise, and that’s only from ten years ago that we’re seeing these staffing numbers. And we have significantly fewer students now than we did in 2015.
Susan Pendergrass (08:10): Yeah, I’ve heard some folks talking about this idea from the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown. When a district is in declining enrollment, what they can do about their expenses, one recommendation was, ask teachers, if there’s thirty-six third graders and you have three teachers, or you have two teachers and they each get eighteen kids, ask them if they want twelve kids or do they want a five to ten thousand dollar pay raise. And most of the time the teachers will pick the five to ten thousand dollar pay raise to keep the eighteen kids. So I wonder if this isn’t superintendents, administrators, and school boards making these decisions that go against what teachers want, because I suspect that teachers would prefer the higher salary. What do you think?
Cory Koedel (08:57): Well, I certainly think the way they talk, yeah, they would like the higher salary. I think the public wants to give teachers a higher salary. So I think that’s probably quite likely. And these class sizes are very low by historical standards already in most places, certainly in Missouri.
Susan Pendergrass (09:13): And I wonder what will happen, you know, the governor a couple of years ago appointed a task force to look into how we could change the way the state funds schools, the state portion, which is about half of state funding. And if they do what they’re supposed to do and make it more fiscally responsible, then I suspect that what the state’s paying will possibly go down, and certainly for some districts it will go down. And I wonder if that will be the wake-up call, where they realize that in a world that’s based on reality, where money doesn’t just keep going up every year, you have to make trade-offs instead of just assuming that there will always be more money in your account. What do you think, Cory?
Cory Koedel (09:58): Yeah. So my reaction to that is, the flip side of that is, without any constraints on funding, of course they’re just gonna keep over-buying resources, right? There’s no, the school district has no incentive to sit there. What are they supposed to do, just sock money aside and do nothing with it? They’re gonna spend it. So I do think at some point we’re gonna hit a fiscal wall here and have to make some tough choices, and we just haven’t had that happen yet. I will say I’m a little more skeptical than you about the politics of actually reducing spending in some of these districts. At some point, at least the growth in spending has to stop. We just can’t afford it.
Susan Pendergrass (10:31): Right.
Cory Koedel (10:32): But as you know, it’s gonna be a big political fight to do anything to rein in the spending in schools.
Avery Frank (10:39): Our paper talks about how there’s probably some legitimate bureaucratic bloat that is happening in some of these school districts, giving people jobs to be part of the education bureaucracy. But there’s also, I mean, there are some other explanations, as we mentioned earlier, where maybe special education requires hiring more people, or whatever. So I think it would be very interesting. That’s kind of what this paper really wants to do. We want to put the information out there. That’s why we do district-by-district reports
Susan Pendergrass (11:09): Yeah.
Avery Frank (11:10): on how much their growth is, because maybe a teacher from Rockwood could look and see this huge growth in administrators and be like, that’s not right, there’s no reason for administrators to grow X amount of percent. I think that’s one of the strengths of this paper we’ve written, that it gives people information to look at their own individual district and be like, this isn’t right, we don’t need this many administrators, what’s going on here?
Susan Pendergrass (11:35): Yeah, I agree. I wonder though if it isn’t an artifact of the fact that the teaching career path is kind of limited, right? So if you want to advance as a teacher, generally they go to administration, because we don’t have it set up with lead teachers like some other countries do, you’re just on your step and ladder until you join administration, and if you’re sort of a gung-ho teacher, that might be where you have to go. And maybe that’s why we see the increase in administration. I will say that you broke this out by locale, and the suburban school districts kind of surprised me, because they’ve had almost a fifty percent increase in the number of administrators since two thousand. Like fifty percent. We don’t have more suburban districts that I’m aware of, right? So that one kind of surprised me.
Cory Koedel (12:24): Yeah, there’s been really large increases. But Susan, I do want to push back a little bit on what you said about, you know, we lack this career path for teachers, so they want to be administrators. It is quite a jump in economic logic to then say we will just have more administrator jobs. Just because people want certain jobs doesn’t mean they’re gonna exist. Certainly in a well-functioning market, that would never happen, it couldn’t survive competition. But the idea that we’re just sort of creating these extra administrative jobs because people want them is inefficient, and if that were true, that would be a big source of spending inefficiency.
Susan Pendergrass (13:00): So what do you think it is?
Cory Koedel (13:01): Look, I think Avery makes a good point that there are more and more administrative rules and regulations put on schools that they have to respond to, and someone could argue that’s a legitimate reason to need more administrators. I would push back on that as well and say maybe we should just cut back on all of the regulations and red tape we’re putting on all these schools so we have fewer administrators. If the schools could function twenty-five years ago with so many fewer administrators, and a lot of people today, myself included, went to school then and it seemed fine, why do we have to add all of this stuff? Is it really doing any good, or is it just a bunch of make-work that the taxpayers are stuck footing the bill for?
Susan Pendergrass (13:41): Yeah, so you guys are gonna have a dashboard on the Show Me Institute website that allows people to look at each district and see how their enrollment, number of teachers, number of support staff, and number of administrators has changed. But I will also make a plug for MoSchoolRankings and our finance data, because when I look at that at the district level, I’m with you, Cory, where I see a lot of spending categories like marketing, legal, a lot of things that I assume are either growing or new, that districts used to manage without that amount of what looks like red tape to me, and then you need people to manage it and also report on it. But I’m kind of surprised, you’ve looked at this, Avery, how funding has shifted from instruction to support, right?
Avery Frank (14:30): Yes, I think this is off the top of my head, I believe it was like forty-nine percent in twenty thirteen for instruction, and now today it’s about forty-two percent, while support services is just a few percentage points below it, ’cause you have non-instruction and support growing, and our share of instructional expenses continues to go down, and that’s a very interesting trend, to be honest. At the same time that’s happening, our student-to-teacher ratio is about twelve, which is below, the national average is fifteen. So it’s like we have more teachers per student, but we also have more administrators, and we’re also spending a higher percentage share on administrators. So there’s a lot of different interesting trends going on in Missouri schools. And I do think the reevaluation of the funding formula in general will have to make us answer a lot of really hard questions, because there are a lot of abnormalities in our
Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (15:30): And certainly in the midst of this personnel boom, we haven’t seen any boom in test scores. Right? To say that we needed this many
Cory Koedel (15:38): Yep, that’s right.
Susan Pendergrass (15:39): people, that’s a tough argument to make, because we’ve been flat and declining when it comes to test scores. But I think that this is great insofar as putting the information in front of people so that we can reevaluate what we’re doing, and maybe we can’t reevaluate five hundred and twenty districts, but the fact is that people are making choices. Boards and administrators making choices. And what they’re choosing is to hire more people instead of paying their existing people more. And that is a fundamental trade-off. And I’m not sure that people realize it’s being made, especially the people that are directly impacted by it. And I think it’s worthwhile to put it out there, because I feel like the teachers are the ones kind of getting the short end of the stick. If I remember correctly, on an inflation-adjusted basis, teacher salaries have gone down. Is that right in the state?
Cory Koedel (16:25): Yep, that’s
Susan Pendergrass (16:25): So
Cory Koedel (16:26): correct.
Susan Pendergrass (16:26): So in fact, teachers are taking this pretty negative situation as a trade-off for having more teachers, and I think we should either bring them to the table to participate in that decision-making, or hold school boards and administrators more accountable. Do you think pensions play into this at all, Cory?
Cory Koedel (16:46): So before I get to the pensions question, I
Susan Pendergrass (16:49): Yes.
Cory Koedel (16:49): wanna come back to what you mentioned, teachers bearing the brunt of this with the lower salaries. I also think we’re all bearing the brunt of it. It depends on how you think things work. But my view, I would rather elevate the prestige of the teaching profession, and by paying more, make it a more professional job where teachers can go in and teach and do what they’re supposed to do. I think that benefits everybody and will lead to stronger schools for everybody. It kind of depends on your view of the world and how you think this functions, but just hiring a bunch more people at low pay, it’s not obvious that’s the best way to have strong schools. So it’s not just the teachers, it’s all of us that are potentially being harmed by this trade-off. The pension issue, and I know you’ve talked about this before, Susan, so it shouldn’t be new, but the pension system in Missouri, like a lot of states, is kind of like a Ponzi scheme. It’s not supposed to be. Every cohort is supposed to self-fund their pensions, but the way these plans work is they end up accruing debt, and then newer generations of teachers have to pay down that debt as they’re going through the workforce. And that’s been going on for decades. So you could argue that this is all a big master plan of teacher
Susan Pendergrass (18:01): Ha ha ha.
Cory Koedel (18:02): unions, or someone who understands that they just need more bodies to pay the pension debt. I personally don’t believe this is such a coordinated effort that it really makes sense as a theory for why this is happening. It certainly helps the pension finances that they keep having a broader and broader base to pull from to fund the pension plan. I would also add, for teachers in the pension plan, they shouldn’t care one way or another. They don’t need more teachers to pay their pensions. Their pensions are going to get paid regardless, unless districts in the state go bankrupt. It’s a very guaranteed benefit. They’re gonna get the money one way or another. So it’s kind of a convoluted argument to get there on the pensions, in my opinion.
Susan Pendergrass (18:46): But as we keep hiring more teachers, there’s gonna be more people with guaranteed benefits, right? It’s going to get more
Cory Koedel (18:51): Sure, no, yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (18:52): expensive.
Cory Koedel (18:53): No, we’re accruing more and more debt the more we do this, that’s right.
Susan Pendergrass (18:57): Well, what I appreciate about this paper and the kind of companion piece on the teacher shortage and the teacher pipeline is, I’d never want to be accused of being anti-teacher. I think it’s a very hard job, and certainly I appreciate that people want to do it, and that there are some really great teachers out there. But I think that these papers are so important in shining light on the fact that we could be talking about it in a more nuanced way, which isn’t just to say we either support teachers or we don’t support teachers. We support teachers with good information, like what’s happening to their salaries, and whether there really is a shortage or not, so that we can all better understand the profession. Because I think right now it’s just held up as this weird thing where altruistic people take low salaries for the hardest job in the world, and I just don’t think that’s a good description of what’s going on there.
Cory Koedel (19:52): Yeah, I’m glad you said that. I don’t think depending on altruism is a good model for such a big portion of the workforce, like you said, and there’s this idea that if you raise any issues with how the market’s functioning, you’re anti-teacher. I just don’t think that makes sense. Personally, the first thing I would want to do out of this is pay teachers more. And I’m sitting there looking at a pot of money that could be used to do that, and we’re not. I also recognize the practical reality, there’s not a big money dump coming in the future. And like you mentioned earlier in
Susan Pendergrass (20:21): Yeah.
Cory Koedel (20:21): the podcast, we may have to have spending cuts. So what are we gonna do? So I do think this is not an anti-teacher issue, but it’s about having a thoughtful discussion about how to manage the teacher workforce and get good people in classrooms and keep them there.
Susan Pendergrass (20:35): Yeah, well that’s great. I appreciate you both coming on and talking about it. I’m sure a lot of people look forward to reading the papers, both this one on the Personnel Boom and the one on the teacher pipeline, and the Personnel Boom data dashboard, which will be on the Show Me Institute website. Thanks so much.
Cory Koedel (20:52): Thanks for having us.
Avery Frank (20:52): Thanks.
Produced by Show-Me Opportunity
