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| Source: Texas Education Agency Retrieved July 17, 2017 |
Earlier today, Kimberly Reeves sent out the following Tweet:
I wish @SenLarryTaylor would fact-check himself when he says teacher to administrator ratio is 1:1. it's not true. #txlege #txed— Kimberly Reeves (@edwonkkimmy) July 17, 2017
The myth of the 1:1 public school teacher to administrator ratio strikes again. It is a convenient myth to believe if you are someone who wants to convince the public that their local school districts don't know how to properly prioritize their financial resources. I had a pretty keen sense of déjà vu, since a similar statement by then Texas Governor Rick Perry led me to write about this same issue in 2011.
I've posted a screen shot above of 2016 staffing statistics as reported by the Texas Education Agency, but just to clarify, here's a quick summary of the classifications of all public school employees by percentage, charter schools included:
- Central Administration - 1.1%
- School Administration - 2.9%
- Professional Support - 9.8%
- Teachers - 50.5%
- Educational Aides - 9.6%
- Auxiliary Staff- 26.1%
Comments I made about public education staffing ratios in my 2011 blog post still apply:
With teachers comprising 50% of the employees of Texas public schools, and administrators only comprising 4%, it can hardly be argued that there is a 1 to 1 ratio of administrators to teachers in our schools. As a professional educator, I myself would be appalled if that were so.
The 1 to 1 ratio of teachers to administrators only works if you count everyone except teachers as administrators. Lumping professional support, aides, and auxiliary staff in with administrators is inaccurate at best and deceitful at its worst.
If some of our state leaders are going to question the way public education is run in Texas, they could at the very least use accurate information. The Texas Education Agency maintains an enormous amount of data, and I was able to find the most current snapshot of public education data in less than five minutes, by searching their website from my smartphone. Surely, government staffers could do the same?
I will close with the graphic below, which shows a snapshot of state staffing percentages from 2010, the last time I addressed this issue on my blog. The percentages haven't changed much. It's time to put the 1:1 teacher to administrator ratio myth to rest. Now. We have enough alternative facts floating around Washington D.C. We don't need them muddying the waters in Texas.
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| Source: Texas Education Agency Retrieved July 27, 2017 |
All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please see specifics on my re-use policy in the right-hand column of my blog before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.
