How much do Houston’s highest paid public school principals make in year? The Houston Chronicle has answers.
According to a recently published analysis of the 50 highest-paid principals in the Houston area, administrator salaries ranged between $153,000 to more than $200,000, roughly 2-to-3 times the median household income. The highest paid principal was Mark Smith, an administrator at Spring Branch ISD, whose base salary alone totaled $201,086. This amount excludes the value of any employment benefits, like healthcare and retirement.
The new data raises fresh questions, like, “why any local employee should make significantly more than the average person in the community they serve?” and, “why should any local employee make more than the Texas governor, who oversees a state of 30 million residents?”
Of course, administrative excess is not a new issue. In fact, reformers have been attempting to rein it in for quite some time. For example, in 2019, the Texas Legislature proposed several measures to reform and restrain superintendent compensation. Those proposed changes—which could well be expanded to encompass other elite administrator types—included: enacting a limitation on superintendent salaries (SB 721); curtailing superintendent severance payments (SB 722); requiring compensation transparency (SB 723); and prohibiting confidentiality agreements under certain circumstances (SB 1600). The 2019 legislative session is, perhaps, the last time where there was a large-scale effort to bring things under control.
Going back even further in time, then-Governor Perry pursued an avenue that was ambitious in its time and could well serve as a model moving forward. To get public education excesses under control (including bloated administrator pay), Perry issued Executive Order RP-47, which “requir[ed] every school district in the state to spend at least 65 percent of its funds directly on classroom instruction.” Had it been faithfully implemented and followed over the long-term, it would have forced school districts to place a heavy emphasis on classroom expenditures—as they should—and make tough decisions about other spending categories, like carefully tracking how much to pay the administrative class.
These solutions and others should inform future policymaking efforts on administrator pay. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that public schools in Houston and elsewhere are unable to control compensation for public education elites on their own. Instead, commonsense legislation is needed to control costs and protect taxpayers from an insatiable system.
And such legislation is needed sooner rather than later.