Whilst looking up my referred visitors and other SEO stuff about the site, I happened upon an incoming link from an article on Mustard Street. I haven’t read their stuff in a while, but this article in particular is a well-written piece that deserves an answer. I was going to just comment, but then I realized that this could get wordy, and decided to make my own post.

The thrust of the article is that a report by the RBJ (which is not available online, even if you paid for it, as I discovered to my chagrin) shows that the top fifty highest-paid public officials in Monroe County are almost all school administrators. Only three slots in this field are employees of some other section of our government. Philbrick is quick to point out that we don’t know whether or not a given administrator has earned that pay, but the theory goes as follows:

Mustard Street: The Highest-Paid Local Officials

But this list helps to illustrate why, we think, Maggie Brooks has the political wind at her back for her FAIR plan, which reduces suburban school district revenues by 1 – 2 %. It explains why it resonates with the public when Brooks says, as quoted in the same RBJ article:

“…these well-paid and non-elected officials are choosing to sue Monroe County rather than finding a 2 percent savings in their total budgets.”

This theory doesn’t hold much water for me, but there are a lot of moving parts, so I’ll take a post to explain my position.

I begin by drawing a distinction here concerning pay scales: this is not the Corporate American Golden Parachute Club by any stretch of the imagination. The highest paid administrator on the list makes $220,000 a year. While I would gladly trade his lunch money for mine - while it is well above the Rochester median income of $31,000 - it’s still only just barely touching on the CEO pay even of small businesses, to say nothing of $10 million pay of Fortune 500 corporate executives. In fact, there are probably people right here in Rochester (few of them CEOs) making more money than that. Those houses in Honeoye Falls don’t pay their mortgages by themselves.

Certainly, there are worse economic fates than to be a school administrator in Monroe County, but Maggie Brooks taking that kind of shot at them is nothing more than a sop for the Conservatives of the County that hardly holds up to a moment’s scrutiny.

Secondly, while Philbrick does indeed point out that the administrators could likely make more money in the private sector, he doesn’t go into detail about what it takes to become a superintendent of schools. Most superintendents have worked for the school system for over twenty years. They usually start out as teachers, work their way up, go back to college for the additional requirements of an administrator, and then wait for someone to leave that top slot, which they don’t often do.

They don’t often leave those positions, that is, unless they’re in Rochester’s school district. When Philbrick cites “the grand tradition of the worst-performing school districts having . . . the highest-paid people,” he assumes that there is no reason their pay should be so high. But the fact is that dysfunction is rampant in the city schools for reasons well beyond the scope of this post, and the blame often goes squarely on the administrators, meaning that the extra pay constitutes hazard pay.

All of this is to say that people who’ve earned a college education, then went back and received the credit-hours and economic expense equivalent to a doctorate, and worked their way to the top - especially where the odds are stacked against them - deserve to be compensated.

And what of the mayor, county executive and other public employees he cites? Well, if only Maggie had done us all the favour and stayed on as a “non-elected” television personality, she too could have been earning all those wads of cash. Sadly, less than twenty years ago, she made a career change to an elected office. Elected offices are not equivalent to earned positions of seniority, either in name or in pay. Sorry. You’re not supposed to get rich.

A final word on the payscale tip. It’s a fact of which Philbrick may not be aware, and I certainly wasn’t until speaking with a resource in the education community, but of which a former County Clerk and current County Executive should certainly be aware: Taylor’s Law specifically forbids government employers from forcing pay cuts for such reasons as a County Executive five-fingering the school’s tax money. I’m sure the authors of the law had sweethearts like Maggie Brooks in mind when they wrote it, no doubt. So, while Maggie would like to turn this into pressure to lower the pay of administrators in the schools, the fact is that it won’t happen. Neither should it, because if we pay for anything at all as a community, we aught not to cheap out on our kids’ education.

As for Philbrick’s contention that F.A.I.R. “reduces suburban school district revenues by 1 – 2 %,” that number is factored after the increase in state aid to the schools, not before it. I’ve made this point several times, but just so it’s been said within the context of this post: the increase in state funding was not a hand-out, it was redress for years of underfunding by the state, and really didn’t even quite balance out state funding to our schools compared to NYC schools and others.

You would think that a Conservative, as taken as they are with bitching about taxes especially of the state variety, would at least want to get the most out of his taxes and not have them all go to New York City. Instead, we find Philbrick justifying Maggie Brooks’ plan to put Monroe County schools 1-2% further behind where they were before. I gotta tell ya, I don’t get that.

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