Terry is a panelist today in Cincinnati at ?Trends in Teacher Compensation ? A Symposium for Educators.? In helping him prepare for the event, we've dug up oodles of data about Ohio's schools and teachers.? One set of numbers really jumped out ? from 2000 to 2008, the number of school-age children in Ohio decreased 6.7% but the number of K-12 teachers increased 17.7%. (These tallies include all school-age children, regardless of whether they attend private school, public school, or are home-schooled, and include both private and public school teachers.)
Rick Hess often points out, as he did in a speech at the City Club of Cleveland last week, that if teacher-student ratios had remained constant since the 1970s we could have average teacher salaries in this country closer to $75,000 than $50,000.? But these figures show us that, in Ohio at least, you don't have to go back near that far to see a more right-sized version of education and that a lot of the current pain schools are feeling might have been prevented if they hadn't gone on a hiring binge over the past decade.
We can lament all we like the wave of teacher layoffs and the impact of ?last hired, first fired? policies.? But with such a mismatch between the number of teachers and students, teachers' salaries and benefits accounting for a good three-quarters of school budgets, and states and schools facing record deficits, a right-sizing is simply inevitable.
- by Emmy Partin and Eric Ulas