The Governor of Mississippi is paid $160,000 a year. At least 34 school district superintendents make more than that.
Every year, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy publishes our Fat Cat report — a look at the highest-paid public officials in the state. This year’s edition is out, and for the first time it doesn’t just sit in a PDF. It lives online as an interactive tool you can search yourself. Type in your district and see what your superintendent is paid — and what your district gets in return.
The picture that emerges is not flattering.
High pay does not buy high performance. The highest-paid superintendent in the state runs Jackson Public Schools — $280,000 a year for a C-rated district. DeSoto County, the largest district in Mississippi and rated A, pays its superintendent less.
Measure it on value for money and the gap grows starker. Divide a superintendent’s salary by the district’s accountability score, and you get the cost to taxpayers per grade point. On that measure, Wilkinson County’s superintendent costs taxpayers roughly 95 times more per grade point than DeSoto’s. Wilkinson County has 694 students and an F rating.
Nor is Wilkinson an outlier. Small districts, big salaries — it is a pattern repeated across the state. Yazoo City pays its superintendent $183,500 to run an F-rated district with fewer than 2,000 students enrolled. Mississippi maintains 141 school districts, 103 of which enroll fewer than 3,000 students. Fifty enroll fewer than 1,500. Each one has its own highly paid superintendent.
Add it all up and superintendent pay comes to $20.4 million a year — an average of about $145,000, or three and a half times what a starting teacher makes. And at the top of the pyramid, the State Superintendent in Jackson is paid $300,000 — nearly twice what the Governor makes.
Defenders of the status quo will say you get what you pay for — that running a school district is a demanding job, and attracting talent requires competitive pay. If that were true, the highest salaries would sit atop the best-performing districts. They don’t.
You might not be surprised to learn that school superintendents are keen to retain control over their multimillion-dollar budgets — and have been among the most opposed to giving parents more power through school choice. They want to prevent your family from having the choices that families in neighboring Arkansas, Tennessee, and Alabama now have. You only need to read our Fat Cat report to start to see why.
So, what should be done?
Some of it has already been attempted. This year the Mississippi House voted unanimously to cap superintendent pay at 250 percent of a comparable teacher’s salary. Unanimously — every Republican and every Democrat. The Senate let the bill die in committee.
Our report sets out seven reforms. Some are simple transparency: every superintendent’s salary should be published online each year, without anyone needing to file a public records request to find it. Some would link pay to performance and district size. And some ask a more basic question — why do 103 districts with fewer than 3,000 students each need their own highly paid superintendent in the first place?
None of this is an attack on public education — quite the opposite. Money spent on administration is money not spent in the classroom. Every superintendent salary of $300,000 could instead pay for more than seven starting teachers.
Transparency is where reform starts. That is why we built this year’s report as a tool anyone can use, rather than a document that gathers dust on a shelf.
It’s your money paying these salaries. You ought to know where it goes.
Douglas Carswell, President & CEO, Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
