What Are Educators Saying About the Tuition Crisis? Part II was curious what educators might, or might not, be saying about the tuition issues facing schools and families today. So I headed over to Lookjed, a forum for Jewish educators.
The subject of the proposed "no frills" school had come up, and it appears that not one educator thought that the idea was actually one that could be put into practice successfully. Reading the comments was interesting because it allowed me, as a parent, to look inside the mind of administrators/educators.
I picked out the following two posts from Rabbi Teitz of JEC in Elizabeth, NJ because I found them the most interesting/revealing. The first reads as a conversation between administration and parents. The second is the same administrator speaking from the perspective of staff. I will post that one shortly after I post this first comment. I have put a small number of comments in
orange.Post 1Allow me to put the matter into very specific terms.
In my school we have around 900 students, preK-12. Our salary budget is around $10,000,000, or about 83% of our $12,000,000 budget.
[Per student cost: approx. $13,333. Website gives no information that I can find on tuition schedules at JEC (Elizabeth, NJ).]An across-the-board 3% increase in salary, which is hardly huge, translates into $300,000+ additional expense (the extra is the 7.65% FICA and Medicare tax, about $23,000, which is a hidden factor but adds up).
Assuming a balanced budget (and even if not balanced, the cash flow must be maintained), we need to find another ~$325,000 to cover the raise.
[I believe a balanced budget is the only way to maintain cash flow unless there are significant reserves or taking on debt is a consideration].Dividing that out over the 900 students means raising tuition by $360 per student. Factor in scholarships (and 20% scholarship is also not unheard of) and the real increase has to approach $450 per student.
[I think that more than 1/2 the tuition issue can be summed up right here. Those who can carry are being asked to carry more and more. But, eventually some of those parents need carried too].And this is just to give the teachers a 3% raise.
[I'm a bit confused why a potential across-the-board raise is being discussed while the average parental income is falling]. We're not factoring in overhead, programs, etc. Cutting programs is enticing, as it can be lead to cutting staff positions. But as others have mentioned, do we cut our social worker or learning lab staff? The reality is that school staffs are significantly larger than they were even a decade or two ago. We hope that the additional staff improves our product. I would not risk cutting the programs to find out.
One suggestion that I heard was to not give across the board raises. There are certainly staff members, teachers and administrators, who are earning well above what our parents earn, especially when looked at on an hourly basis. Does everyone need an annual increase? While this is not as difficult a matter as merit pay, which has yet to find a way to judge the full value of a teacher's input into the growth of a student, one has to wonder how we would decide who needs the money most. Do we ask staff to justify their need for a raise, as we ask parents to justify their need for a scholarship? I'm sure many parents would see poetic justice in that arrangement - having teachers submit their income and expenses to a group of parents for them to divide the fixed pot of tuition dollars allocated to salaries.
[Wages are normally set by the market, not by the "needs" of the employee. Merit pay is something difficult to determine in the education sector. But if pay is being set by an employee's needs, and in some Jewish organizations I believe it is, then it is no wonder that salaries are taking up more and more of the budget.]I'm sure there are some members of our staffs where only one spouse works. When looking at parental scholarship requests, we ask parents in similar situations why they expect the school to carry the burden of supporting such a life style; we expect that, barring exceptional situations, both parents will be gainfully employed. Parents can justifiably turn that back on us and our assumptions of fair salaries and the number of wage earners in a family.
[Homemaking is really getting a bad rap lately. I guess it is an easy target].One answer given to this challenge is to increase outside funding. That is easier said than done. Many donors are moving away from general donations, preferring targeted giving to specific programs. While this is wonderful for gaining gifts of equipment that are beyond our reach (could we really afford smartboards for all our classrooms at $4000-5000 a pop?), it does nothing to help the bottom line. And there is not an endless supply of outside donors either. Many of the biggest givers are hit up by a growing number of institutions, so that even if actual giving goes up, each school gets a smaller piece of the pie.
[To say nothing of the growing number of institutions].Finding new donors is like searching for a needle in a haystack. If someone has enough money for a big gift, chances are others know about the person as well, or will in short order. And the really big gift takes years to cultivate; it is rare to get a letter in the mail from a lawyer with a multi-million dollar check from an unknown donor's estate. The larger the gift, the longer the development time, the more opportunity others have to approach the donor as well.
PEJE has tried to nudge schools into sharing costs where possible. I think that statistics bear out that most day schools have less than 100 students. Schools such as these might be able to find ways of sharing certain back office expenses: does each school need an executive director? can schools share office staff? But mid-size and larger schools have more than enough to maintain full-time executive directors, controllers, maintenance managers, technologists, and social workers. Joining with other schools just doesn't work.
[I really don't think sharing resources should be dismissed as impossible. It would be nice is the suggestion of PEJE was at least given a fair trial in a pilot program. Many companies outsource certain functions because taking care of them in-house is far too pricey. At least in smaller (public) school districts, certain administrators/employees are shared by numerous schools].The only real way to stop the inexorable creep of salaries is to cap them. That way we know that there is a maximum salary load that we will achieve, within reason. This does not address newly created positions to address student needs. But schools will set different caps, or they will lure away a prized teacher by making a salary cap exception. I am gaining a stronger appreciation for professional sports owners and their problems with run-away salaries. And our salaries are hardly exorbitant. Do we go to a system where we declare "franchise" teachers and any school poaching one has to pay a penalty or open its protected teachers to being approached by other schools in return? And how do we balance less affluent schools against the more affluent? And how do we decide on a cap- a per hour rate? What about positions that are harder to fill? Is there one rate for language arts teachers and another for science teachers? Do limudei kodesh teachers get a preferential rate?
[Perhaps this is where combining resources can help. Salary ranges could be set in a "district," rather than in individual schools. As I understand, salaries have been driven up by the competition for prized staff.]Reality also has to play a role. In searching for a new principal over the past few years, I was struck that a thirty-something applicant, without any experience as a principal, only some limited work as an assistant principal, expected to earn over $175,000 in salary and benefits.
Where does that leave a school moving forward? And the number of teachers we all have that are approaching or who have surpassed $100,000 annual salaries is increasing.
[Perhaps promoting from within at lesser salaries, rather than trying to recruit principals from the outside that demand incredible salaries, despite inexperience, is a route that should be pursued. Who better to understand the inner workings of a school, the needs of the students, and the expectations of the parents body that someone who has already been in the trenches?]. In the real world, those salaries are not common.
[Hear, hear!] I am not advocating for salary caps. I am just at a loss looking to the future for a way to continue to make ends meet. The real world work force does not have automatic annual increases. They do not have a 10-month a year job structure. There is increased expectation that jobs are not 9 - 5 any more. People stay at work until the job is done, no matter how late it gets. And they give up weekends when needed. And there is no extra compensation for work that has to be taken home to be completed. And vacation days get eaten up by the chaggim. These are, increasingly, the realities faced by our parent body. And these have been the reasons we have given for justifying our salaries (teaching is more than just classroom time, we do research and prepare over the summer, etc.).
Charter schools, after-school programs and no-frills schools are not the answer. The first two will wilt as soon as final exams and other high stakes tests are encountered. Do we really expect the same effort from students who are in a program that does not affect their GPA when the SAT is a month away? We need to be realistic. No-frills schools have other, external costs, as has been discussed already. The system we have is the one with which we must work.
We need to be much more sensitive to parental fears. The current financial crisis has actually given us that opportunity. Cutting costs where possible, holding staff salaries in place, making a serious drive to increase gifts from donors, and a minimal increase in tuition shows that we are looking to spread the burden across all stakeholder groups. That worked this year.
My real worry is what to do if next year is equally economically dismal. Where will we cut then? I have no answer.
Not for 2010-11. Not for further down the line.
[It is obvious to me that day schools don't really view themselves as part of a free market system, despite being funded directly through fees, rather than through taxes. If those running schools in this environment did relate to the free market, I believe they would be looking try new ideas.]Eliyahu Teitz
