Is NEA Reading Its Own Research? Last week, the National Education Association released its latest edition of Rankings & Estimates with the headline: "Teachers Take 'Pay Cut' as Inflation Outpaces Salaries." The subhead reads: "NEA President Warns Students Pay the Price with High Teacher Turnover."

I suppose it's hopeless to point out that NEA mistakes cause for effect. "High teacher turnover" means high-paid teachers retire and are replaced by low-paid rookies, thereby reducing the growth in the "average" salary. If I have two teachers earning $70,000 each, and one retires and I replace her with a teacher earning $35,000, the average salary has been reduced by 25 percent, but that's hardly an argument for a hike in pay.

But there's an even bigger reason why the average teacher salary doesn't rise to reflect the amount taxpayers are sinking into public education. NEA's own research provides it, but the union's self-interest prevents it from highlighting it in any context whatsoever.

America continues to hire armies of teachers.

EIA has illustrated this before, but public school district hiring and firing practices appear to bear no relationship to the one factor that should drive them: student enrollment.

According to NEA's own estimates, student enrollment in the United States will grow this school year by a total of 349,452 students (0.7 percent). The number of classroom teachers is expected to grow by 62,443 (2.0 percent). That, my friends, is one new teacher for every 5.5 new students.

That's not even the most ridiculous statistic. Most of the enrollment growth is in secondary school, as the last of the Baby Boomers' children work their way through high school. Secondary school enrollment is expected to grow by 1.4 percent, while the number of secondary school teachers is expected to grow by only 1.0 percent.

Elementary school enrollment is expected to grow by only 88,595 students (0.3 percent), but we're planning to hire 49,965 more elementary school teachers (2.8 percent). That's one new K-8 teacher for every 1.8 new K-8 students.

This simply cannot be sustained. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that someday soon the marginal increase in teachers – in actual numbers, not percentage - will exceed the marginal increase in students.

This is not a new problem. In the last 10 years, elementary enrollment increased by a total of 4.2 percent. But the number of elementary school teachers increased by 19.1 percent.

Is any of this sinking in? I don't know, but last week's newspapers were filled with "surprising" enrollment figures from all across the country:

Published Friday, November 17, 2006
Florida School Enrollment Far Below Projections
By BILL KACZOR, The Associated Press

LINK

TALLAHASSEE - School districts will lose $203 million in state assistance because statewide enrollment increased by fewer than 500 students this year, far below the projected growth rate, Florida education officials said Thursday.

The 0.02 percent increase is the lowest since the 1981-82 school year, when statewide enrollment also declined by less than a percentage point.

The net growth of only 477 students brought statewide enrollment to 2,641,598. The Department of Education had projected an increase of 48,853 students that lawmakers used when writing the annual state budget.

The number of Polk County kindergartners through high school seniors hit a record high of 91,494, jumping by 2,811 students, or 3.2 percent, from last year.

Polk administrators expected 90,868 students for the 60th-day count, the official fall head count to secure state funding. That estimate was short by 626.

The 60th day of school was Oct. 27.

The $203 million in enrollment-based funding that's no longer needed - out of $9.9 billion in state assistance - will return to Florida's treasury. The Legislature then will decide how it will be spent. School districts also will lose about $1 million out of $8.4 billion in local funding.

Cheri Pierson Yecke, state chancellor for kindergarten through 12th grade, said officials can only speculate on why the enrollment has become stagnant.

"We don't know because there are multiple factors at play," Yecke said. "Affordable housing is one. Insurance costs is another."

Nearly half of Florida's 67 school districts have experienced enrollment declines. Some of those 29 counties have had large increases in housing costs, while many with the biggest growth have more affordable housing, Yecke said.

Monroe, Madison, Franklin and Glades counties had the biggest declines, ranging from 3 percent to 11 percent. Flagler County posted the biggest increase of nearly 10 percent followed by St. Lucie County at 7 percent.

The districts with declining enrollments still will receive half of their per-student funding from the state for each student lost.

County enrollments figures will be released today. Officials in many districts had anticipated missing their projections and already have made staffing and budgetary adjustments, Yecke said.

She said it still took state officials by surprise because they didn't begin to hear that districts were expecting lower numbers until the spring and summer - after the Legislature already had approved the annual state budget.

The enrollment numbers, though, aren't all bad news. "This will make it easier for districts to meet class-size requirements," Yecke said.

An amendment to the Florida Constitution that voters approved in 2002 sets limits of 18 students for kindergarten through third grade, 22 for fourth through eighth grade and 25 for high school.

Those levels must be achieved in every classroom by 2010-11. Until then the measure is being phased in. This year, the average class size for each school must conform to the limits.

The lower-than-expected enrollment also will help with a teacher shortage, but education officials still estimate Florida will need 21,875 new teachers next year.

That estimate is based partly on an enrollment projection for slightly more than 30,000 new students next year. That number, though, is subject to change as officials re-examine models used to make enrollment projections.

Material from The Ledger's staff was used in this report.

Nov. 17, 2006, 12:07PM
HISD enrollment down by 7,000 for fall semester
Charter schools and affordable suburban homes are being blamed for the 3% decline
By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE, Houston Chronicle
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Shedding students The Houston school district lost more than 7,000 students this fall — marking the sharpest enrollment decline in more than a decade in what now appears to be the nation's eighth-largest school district.

The district's preliminary 2006-07 enrollment of 203,163 students is down more than 3 percent from last October, when Houston-area schools were swollen with Hurricane Katrina evacuees. It's still a 2.5 percent decline from the district's pre-Katrina enrollment of 208,454 in 2004-05.

"It's a wake-up call," school trustee Dianne Johnson said. "It's a piece of data that we need to be looking at."

To reverse the trend, Johnson said HISD should beef up its popular magnet programs and expand its other school-choice options. It should also aggressively market the strong programs already available to residents.

"The district has much, much to offer people," Johnson said.

HISD spokesman Terry Abbott attributed the declining enrollment to several factors, including a glut of affordable suburban homes, the state's burgeoning charter-school movement and the return of about 3,000 evacuees to New Orleans.

"More and more young families are moving out of the city in search of more affordable housing," he said.

Elementary losses
HISD lost 3,109 middle and high school students and 3,930 elementary students — including about 1,000 prekindergartners — this year.

The drop coincides with the district's expansion of the early-childhood program to full-day, which squeezed available money and classroom space, Abbott said.

The district also limited the number of 3-year-olds accepted into prekindergarten to make space for 4-year-olds.

Within the district, the west and central regions took the largest hit, losing a combined 4,400 students.

But board member Harvin Moore, who represents parts of that area, said the declines are far from universal. Many of these campuses, such as Briargrove, Grady and West University elementaries, are bursting at the seams, he said.

"It would be inaccurate just to say people are moving to the suburbs," he said. HISD's "upper-middle-class schools have been increasing in popularity and size for a very long time."

Publicizing pre-K program
One key to attracting families to the district will be publicizing its expanded prekindergarten program to try to keep some parents from enrolling their young children in private schools, school board President Diana Davila said.

"We've got to start to make sure we take care of our own," Davila said. "We have to ensure that we have the right programs all across the city."

In some neighborhoods, HISD has to compete with developers from suburbs such as Pasadena, who go door to door trying to recruit families to the new subdivisions they're building, she said.

Though enrollment figures won't be complete until January, reports from nearby suburban districts are mixed. A few area districts, including Alief, Galveston, La Porte, Spring Branch and Galena Park, either remained flat or decreased from last year.

Many others — including Pearland, Katy, Spring and Cypress-Fairbanks — saw strong gains. Cy-Fair's enrollment climbed nearly 7 percent this year to 92,173 and is up more than 16 percent from two years ago.

"We get kids every day, literally," Cy-Fair Assistant Superintendent Kelli Durham said. "We are continuing to grow at a phenomenal rate. ... We have seen a lot of families return to raise their families in Cypress-Fairbanks."

The growth has Cy-Fair among the 40 largest school districts in the country, up from No. 59 in 1999-2000. It's the third-largest in Texas behind Houston and Dallas.

Houston, however, is headed in the opposite direction. Having hovered at about 210,000 students for years, HISD cites itself as the seventh-largest U.S. school district.

But now the Philadelphia school system is claiming the "seventh largest" title on its Web site. That district is reporting 217,405 this year, including about 28,000 students in charter schools that the school district authorizes and oversees, district spokeswoman Amy Guerin said.

"We go back and forth, to be honest," she said. "We've been the sixth or the eighth. I've written both. It's so hard to figure out."

Charter-school option
Since Texas' charters are granted and managed by the state, traditional public school systems here can lay little claim to their enrollments. A recent study by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools shows that about 32,000 children in the Houston region attend charter schools.

Parent Celia Galvan said she opted to send her daughter Monica, a sixth-grader, to YES Prep Public Schools' southeast campus after the 11-year-old was rejected by her top magnet-school choices in HISD.

"I was applying here, there and everywhere," Galvan said.

After hearing about YES and researching the school's test scores on the Internet, Galvan said she decided to enter her daughter into the admission lottery. She was thrilled when Monica got a spot.

"I was impressed at some of the stuff (YES) had and how they were doing things," she said, and she added that she hopes to send her two younger children, third- and fourth-graders at HISD's Garden Villas Elementary, to YES.

jennifer.radcliffe@chron.com

"Traditional schools in DPS up 2 pupils" (Denver)

"San Diego Unified, like many districts throughout California, is in a chronically declining enrollment phase."

Average salary increases will always appear smaller when spread among a growing number of employees. Once hired, there is a significant "enrollment lag" before the size of the labor force reflects a decrease or slowing in student enrollment. Thanks to tenure protections, reducing the workforce generally can happen only two ways: retirement and layoff of probationary teachers. Or what some people might term "high teacher turnover." We'll see more of it in the coming years.

The Cost of Teacher Turnover (in Texas)