The Tortured Mathematicians Department (A Correction to Last Week's Story)
🎉 Also we reach the 1,000 Subscribers milestone 🎉
A reader (“EB”) reached out to me to take offense to a table that I had posted in a prior story regarding K-8 vs High School teacher compensation differences. In particular, they took offense with how I presented the salary differences, which I represented in an accurate but confusing way.1
As my reader pointed out, that’s not necessarily representative of being paid a “% less than”. I agree with some caveats. Here’s the new table (I will correct the previous story)
You would read this as:
In Evanston, the District 65 teachers make 80.73% of what the ETHS teachers make (or 19.27% less). In order to get them to the same level, you’d have to grant a 23.86% raise.
In Skokie, the K-8 teachers make 55% of what the Niles HS teachers make (or 44.5% less). In order to get them to the same level, you’d have to grant an 80.73% raise.2
In the New Trier district, the K-8 teachers make 67% of what the New Trier HS teachers make. In order to get them up to the same level, you’d have to give a 47.89% raise.
Hopefully, you can see that even if a District wanted to consolidate, the finances are going to be very difficult. It would involve solving the historical pay gap while at the same time, not decreasing the compensation of high school teachers.
In Evanston, I calculated that number to be around $20 million dollars.3
But at the same time, you (as a citizen and voter) have to weigh your political beliefs about the gender and educator pay gap versus the potential increase in taxes. To that end, stay tuned, I have future content coming on this:
I’ve reached out to both Robin Gabel and Laura Fine - Evanston and Skokie state representative and senator, respectively. The legislature has tried to fix this many times (notably 1947, 1985, 2007), including making state funding available to remedy the pay and consolidation costs.
I’m trying to understand the history of this two tiered system - Illinois remains one of the few places in all the United States with this system. I’ve been talking to the State Archivist and trying to find documents from the 1947 creation of this system.
I’ve built a ton of new data tables on taxes, particularly around school district tax levies, bond rules, and the arcane world of municipal taxation.
🎉 Milestone 🎉
Lastly, some good news: FOIA GRAS has reached 1,000 subscribers! Given that there are about 30,000 households in Evanston, that means about 2-3% of the households here are subscribers. That’s pretty exciting. In case you’re curious, the average post gets between 1,000 and 8,000 readers. The most popular stories (greatest hits?) are the one on the PTA PEP Fund, Dr. Horton Steering Contracts to Business Partners, and the Free Lunch Program for Administrators.
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I usually think of these differences as lift where the math is (new - old) / old, which represents the size of a raise you’d have to give someone to reach the new level. I worked in corporate finance for GrubHub for a few years and this notion of “difference” gets hard-coded into the brain because a corporate finance department is always wondering, “how much more do I have to spend?” or “how much did this increase/decrease year over year”
This is just an insane differential and I would argue that there is no reasonable justification for a gap this large.
Hence the reason I use “lift” (new - old) / old in my calculations! My math is all in this spreadsheet.
One thing that worries me about consolidation is that if we ended up with a rotten school board like the current and recently past one, we would ruin not only K-8 but the high school as well. So I’m thankful that our current (D65) board, who is spending close to $70 million (including interest and architect fees) on building a K-5 school while they let all of their other schools rot, does not also have jurisdiction over the high school. When I’ve been in ETHS to take my kids to swimming lessons, I’m always impressed with the well kept landscaping, the interior condition of the building, as well as the decor and displays of athletic teams in that hallway. D65 has no clue on what impact the condition of schools and how their aesthetics affect students (and teachers).
Thank you for this correction and clarity. I am very interested to learn what has been attempted in the past, and why it did not succeed. Also interested to know if one district can have a multi-tiered system- I suspect the unions would have something to say about this, but then again, they haven’t pushed the gender pay gap issue very successfully. At the end of the day, two things are clear: we have an elementary school district with a huge budget, yet they can’t seem to educate all them and they have completely mismanaged the finances to terrible effect. The second thing we know is that we can’t spend money to save money- even for good intentions. We can’t spend money to equal the pay field between the two districts in order to save money from a district that can’t seem to operate in a fiscally sound manner. Just look what attempting to save a measly $3M in bussing costs have done to us.