A report from EdChoice documents two staffing trends in public schools. After a temporary pause during the Great Recession, school staffing in the U.S. resumed an upward trajectory, and hiring tilted toward non-teaching personnel as compared to teachers. The report concludes that staffing growth outpaces enrollment growth and that there has been no corresponding increase in student performance. The report then recommends increasing teacher pay, at the expense of non-teaching staff, and school choice. While the data on staffing trends are obtained from NCES publications, the report’s discussion of inputs, outcomes, and policy approaches is poorly grounded, leading to unsupported conclusions and policy prescriptions. It does not examine why there has been a staffing surge or whether it reflects a valid use of personnel. It evaluates the effectiveness of school staffing changes using concurrent achievement and finance measures, and it fails to acknowledge that educational outcomes have steadily improved, even though any benefits of staffing increases will be lagged and only show up gradually over time. The report presents no logical relationship between staffing trends and the solutions proposed. As a result, the report is irrelevant and is devoid of any important policy implications.

The School Staffing Surge, Part II is a companion report to a 2012 report called The School Staffing Surge. The earlier report argued that between 1992 and 2009, the number of full-time-equivalent school employees grew 2.3 times faster than the increase in students over the same period. It also claimed that despite these staffing increases, there was no progress on test scores or drop-out reductions. The new report disaggregates the trends in K-12 hiring for individual states and responds to some of the criticisms leveled at the original report. Yet this new report, like the original, fails to acknowledge that achievement scores and dropout rates have steadily improved. What it does instead is present ratios comparing the number of administrators and other non-teaching staff to the number of teachers or students, none of which has been shown to bear any meaningful relationship to student achievement. Neither the old report nor this new one explores the causes and consequences of employment growth. When a snapshot of hiring numbers is not benchmarked against the needs and realities of each state, it cannot illuminate the usefulness or wastefulness of hiring. The new companion report, much like the original one, is devoid of any important policy implications.

The School Staffing Surge finds that between 1992 and 2009, the number of full-time equivalent school employees grew 2.3 times faster than the increase in students over the same period. The report claims that despite these staffing and related spending increases, there has been no progress on test scores or drop-out reductions. The solution, therefore, is school choice. However, the report fails to adequately address the fact that achievement scores and drop-out rates have actually improved. If the report had explored the causes and consequences of the faster employment growth, it could have made an important contribution. However, it does not do so. Unless we know the duties and responsibilities of the new employees, any assertion about the effects of hiring them is merely speculative. Further, the report’s recommendations are problematic in its uncritical presentation of school choice as a solution to financial and staffing increases. The report presents no evidence that school choice - whose record on improving educational outcomes and efficacy is mixed - will resolve this “problem.” The report's advocacy of private school vouchers and school choice seem even odder given that private schools have smaller class sizes and charter schools appear to allocate a substantially greater portion of their spending on administrative costs—two of the main policies attacked in the report.

]The South Carolina Policy Council Education Foundation report, How School Choice Can Create Jobs for South Carolina, argues that school choice, in the form of vouchers to attend private schools, would create significant job opportunities in five poor, rural counties of South Carolina. The report, however, relies almost exclusively on results of an earlier study that has significant limitations in its methodology and execution, rendering its findings unreliable. The report also introduces questionable assumptions while extrapolating these findings to the five focus counties -- assumptions that drive the outcomes but are unlikely to hold in practice. As a result of its uncritical acceptance of an earlier flawed study and in its introduction of additional untenable assumptions, the report offers findings that are unlikely to be valid and is of little use in informing policymakers and the public about the effects of vouchers.

Suggested Citation: Roy, J. (2010). Review of “How School Choice Can Create Jobs for South Carolina.” Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved [date] from http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/Review-How-School-Choice