According to a new report, between 2020 and 2026:
Government school student enrollment declined by 2.7%.
Teacher employment declined by 5.5%.
Administrator staffing increased by 9.6%.
Counselors, social workers and psychologists increased by 4.7%.
Other support staff increased by 4.6%.
What all this means that, with students fleeing from the schools and choosing other ways to obtain an education, the government schools are losing teachers, which is to be expected. But rather than pass that savings on to the taxpayers, they are hiring hordes of bureaucrats, social workers and psychologists!
Why?
That’s the question asked in the report from Foundation for Florida’s Future, titled “Where Did the Money Go?”
It notes that even with school populations declining from 2020 to 2025, spending by government schools increased by more than $3 billion. Then it went up another $1 billion this year, although how that was used is not included in the report because the data was not available.
But the money spent during the period 2020-25 did not go into classrooms. The number of teachers went down 5.5 percent.
(By the way, don’t grieve for the teachers leaving the government schools. Many switched to private schools and in a recent survey, 92 percent reported being happier.)
Meanwhile, the number of administrators increased almost 10 percent.
There was a 4.7 percent increase in counselors, social workers and psychologists.
Think about that: fewer students and teachers and more bureaucracy.
That’s like hiring more brass for an army while the number of privates and non-coms who do the righting is decreasing.
Spending per pupil increased 12 percent over the period, even after adjusting for inflation.
The benefit taxpayers get from school choice is eye-opening. It costs about half as much to supplement a student exercising choice as it does to pay for one to attend a government school. Government schools get money for capital spending and choice schools do not but even without considering capital outlay, the government schools get $5,000 more per pupil.
Florida leads the nation in school choice.
Overall, 53 percent of Florida students now use some form of choice, including the choice options in government schools, such as charter schools.
One of the myths spread by Big Education is that Florida is somehow deficient because education spending is lower than most other states.
This is measuring effectiveness by input rather than output. In fact, there is little or no correlation between spending and achievement in education.
The truth is that Florida is a “high value” state because at a relatively low cost it produces students who achieve test scores equal to many other states that spend a lot more money.
An example of “low value” would be New York, which outspends every state but produces far too many students who can’t read and write.
The question Florida taxpayers should be asking is, why aren’t the shrinking government schools cutting taxes instead of hiring more social workers for fewer students?
