The Mississippi Legislature appears committed to making some changes this year to the way it funds the state’s K-12 public schools.
Presently, the House and Senate are far apart on how drastic those changes should be.
The House wants to scrap the current funding formula, the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, and replace it with one of its own devising. The Senate wants to keep MAEP in place but modify it.
The idea that MAEP needs work — whether modest or massive — has been bolstered by the research that State Auditor Shad White continues to do on education funding. In a report released this week, White maintains that the statistics continue to bear out what he has been saying for years: namely, that too much of the education dollar in Mississippi goes to administration instead of the classroom.
According to the report, between 2006 and 2021, the average daily attendance in Mississippi’s public schools fell by about 60,000. Yet during that same period, administrative spending, after adjusting for inflation, increased by more than 6% while classroom spending dropped by almost 8%. For 2021, the latest year looked at, Mississippi spent a larger percentage of its budget on administration than any other state in the South.
When the spending on administration in this state is compared to the national and regional averages, the percentage difference might not seem too bad: 9.59% of the education budget in Mississippi vs. 8.2% regionally and 8.09% nationally. That’s until you translate the difference into dollars. Had Mississippi been spending at the national average on administration that year, according to White, it would have had $144 million more to send to the classroom — enough to give every teacher in the state an extra $4,500 a year in salary.
White’s report doesn’t speculate on what’s causing the administrative bloat. It could be that added layers of state regulation, including dictates imposed by the Legislature, are requiring more pencil pushers to comply with them. It could be that during times of declining enrollment, teacher numbers naturally contract faster than administrative ones. It could be that too many districts have superintendents who build fiefdoms.
Whatever the cause, school boards could correct the situation by adjusting the number of administrators to the size of the district. They might, however, need an incentive to do so. Changes to how schools are funded could provide that push.
