Links and Commentary 3/6/25

First, some housekeeping. Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly newsletter where I write about education and share a handful of interesting links. We’re at an interesting point in American education, one in which everything we thought we knew about schooling seems to be going away. I want to write about that, and other topics in education that I find interesting. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, please subscribe. I plan to put up the paywall in March (maybe?).

Can a superintendent earn too much?

If you’re the manager in a reasonably large business, it’s not crazy if you make a six-figure income. Walmart stores generally have more than 100 employees and serve thousands of customers a day. Management there doesn’t just oversee those employees, though. They’re responsible for staffing, logistics, ordering, dealing with corporate, store security, customer satisfaction, and so on. A general manager there will earn a salary around $120,000 a year before factoring in various bonuses and incentives. That doesn’t seem ridiculous given that an effective general manager at a big box retailer could probably do many other jobs that pay a similar amount.

It also doesn’t seem crazy that a high school principal who oversees a staff in the low hundreds and potentially a student body in the thousands could earn a similar amount of money. Schools, like any organization, have all kinds of less noticed responsibilities that fall on the administrative teams and earning around $110k a year for the head honcho seems about right. After all, with that skillset they could go manage a Walmart so it’s probably good to have somewhat competitive pay.

You can also apply this same logic to district leadership, but it seems like that’s not entirely how it plays out. On average the superintendent of a school district does not make all that much more than a high school principal. Somewhere in the neighborhood of $150k. There are some notable exceptions. For example, Alberto Carvalho the general superintendent of the Los Angeles school system had a total compensation of nearly $500,000 in 2022 (the most recent year I could find data for). Does his pay make sense? Well, he oversees more than 1,300 schools, 24,000 teachers, and 500,000 students. This, if you look at the numbers as a decent proxy for complexity, kind of similar to managing a large corporation. Ford Motor Company employs about 170,000 people. Their CEO makes upwards of $20 million a year. I have no idea if a good superintendent could be an effective auto company CEO but would he be 40 times worse? Would the CEO of Ford be 20 times better at managing LAUSD? Who knows? Sometimes pay is not only a function of the work of the job itself. Sometimes it’s a function of the risks you manage as part of the job.

Anyway, you might be surprised to learn that the superintendent of Valere Public Schools, a small charter network consisting of three schools, about 200 staff, and 1000 students has a total compensation of almost $900,000. Most of that is bonuses he’s been given by the board that oversees the charter network.

I think it’s important to note that this board is not the same as a school board. School boards are elected by constituents. Charter boards are appointed by the charter authorizer and are not directly accountable to the public. In the case of Valere schools, it seems like the money shenanigans aren’t new, either.

Nor is the Valere Public Schools charter network the only charter network in Texas with highly paid superintendents.

One thing to remember here is that these are not private schools with some crazy donor shoveling money at the school’s leadership. Charter schools are technically public. They are paid by taxpayer dollars. It seems crazy to me that someone running a district with about 500 times fewer students and 120 times fewer employes should be earning nearly double what the superintendent of LAUSD is earning. Especially because:

And people wonder why I don’t really trust charter schools?

Don’t discount nature

Look. I don’t love Freddie deBoer and I think about 50% of his takes are wrong on the merits. A lot of the time I just can’t relate to him through his writing, and I feel like when he writes about music, art, movies, etc. that he’s working very hard to be so outside the mainstream that it’s got to be a performance. He’s like the kid in college who goes on and on about how his favorite band is Fugazi and would continually claim they’re a fake band even though they tour and play concerts and released albums for two decades. He’s the guy who made fun of the guy who would say he likes obscure films “you’ve never heard of” and then name an obscure film you’ve never heard of as his favorite. Like I said, I don’t get it.

Thing is, the other 50% of his takes are, if not right, at least worth paying attention to and thinking about. One of the takes that I think deserves way more attention comes from his book, The Cult of Smart. Here’s a summary of his beliefs someone wrote when reviewing his book:

This is kind of what I mean when I think about the kids who can’t. We base many of our misguided reforms on the idea that performance gaps can be closed, that every kid should be college bound, that given adequate opportunities every single human child has the same chance to achieve everything. It’s just not true but ignoring that allows reformers to, I dunno, push charter schools in the name of better serving poor minority kids. It lets us place blame on teachers for not trying hard enough, on unions for stifling innovation, and on schools for failing to build the economy of the future. My thing is, conservatives know this. Their answer is to, more or less, give up on every kid they assume is a kid who can’t. I’m sure you can imagine who that is. Get their preferred kids vouchered out to private schools. Leave the kids who can’t in defunded publics where they’ll be poorly served by the husk of what remains post-Trump.

Freddie’s point is that liberals and progressives don’t have a good answer here so long as they cling to the Cult of Smart. Just because nature makes us different doesn’t mean we have to live in an unjust society or that we have to give into some eugenics experiment, so quit ignoring nature. The whole post is worth a read. The book, too.

AI and Schoolwork

One of the things people say when discussing students using AI to complete work is that an assignment AI can complete must be an assignment that’s not worth doing. I’ve had this thought myself! Hell, back when Open AI released ChatGPT to the general public, this is one of the first things people were talking. This was in no small part due to influential tech journalist Ben Thompson writing about asking ChatGPT to do his daughter’s homework essay. It also gets the answer wrong but that serves as a great jumping off point to talk about how LLM like ChatGPT work. At the end, he returns to homework and makes the point I mentioned above.

They don’t need to know content. Content is easy to come by. They need to learn to do whatever it is that we hope should be done with that content. Thompson calls it true and beautiful and that this model of education will make AI valuable and reliable. At least that’s how I’m parsing that last sentence. The “it” in “only then will it be valuable and reliable” is not referring to the students’ work but to the AI’s content. I think we’ve forgotten that little nuance of Thompson’s. He straight up says that the AI content is not worth anything on its own. What we get, though, is people remembering only the first part, that it is not important for students to learn content. I feel like that’s been the status quo assumption ever since.

I don’t often see people push back against this position and I was pleasantly surprised to come across a post and longer article by Philip D. Bunn doing just that. Both are worth a read but here’s the gist of it:

Coincidentally, both he and Thompson are talking about writing assignments comparing and contrasting major social contract thinkers — e.g. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. It actually is important for the students to attempt to grok (heh) the content of these theories by reading and making mistakes and muddling through. Getting an AI summary and then editing it is simply not the purpose of an education.

DEI Red Scare Connections

Clay Risen makes the case that today’s effort to purge DEI from schools is similar to the Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s. It even features astroturf mom groups running around at school board meetings calling for books to be banned and teachers fired. I suppose it’s important for me to say that I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the communist party. I didn’t pick up Risen’s book yet but I’m interested to know what the long-term implications of this purge of educators was. If I had to guess, Vietnam.

Would you like to cry?

Here are two heart wrenching stories about teachers, forming community, and actually giving a fuck about kids in ways they understand and see.

The Teacher in Room 1214 is about a teacher at Marjorie Stone Douglas, in Parkland Florida and her journey to serve her students the aftermath of the 2018 school shooting there.

The other is As Immigrant Students Flee in Fear of ICE Raids, Teachers Offer Heartfelt Gifts. That seems self-explanatory but I promise it’s not. The note with the Rubick’s cube made me choke up.

Thats all for today. Thanks for reading.