Debates about public school funding sometimes include an underlying assumption that more funding results in better student outcomes. Available data tells a more complex story. Our review of 12,531 school districts across the country shows a negative correlation between overhead and student performance. In other words, districts that spent more on teacher and administrative pay saw their students’ standardized test scores drop.

Using the Open the Books proprietary database of government salaries across America, we calculated how much each U.S. state increased its total public school payrolls from 2019 to 2023. We compared that number to the change in each state’s ranking on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which measures reading and math skills for 4th and 8th graders.

By plotting the percentage change in payroll, state by state, versus the percentage change in the national rankings of its districts, a surprising picture emerges. Growing payrolls are not closely correlated with improved performance among districts in a given state. In fact, the opposite correlation appears. There is a mild inverse relationship between these two data sets. Higher overhead costs are associated with lower test scores.

In layman’s terms, that means while schools may hope that increasing their payroll will help their students outperform other states, there is little evidence in the data to support that claim. Again, the opposite seems to be true.

There were six states that increased their school payrolls by at least 23% from 2019 to 2023. Four of them saw student performance decrease, and one saw no change. Only Utah moved up in the NAEP rankings. *** Scafidi wrote that this “irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars is indefensible,” and that was before the surge in salaries over the last few years. From 2010 to 2022, the number of administrative staff rose by another 41%, while overall school employment rose by only 10%.

In 2023, 8,884 public school employees across the country earned salaries of at least $200,000, costing $2.08 billion,*** Christian Barnard, assistant director of education reform at the Reason Foundation, previously reported that per-pupil spending in the U.S. increased by almost 21% from 2002 to 2019, but 64% of the increased spending was used to pay benefits for instructional and support staff. Barnard found that if benefit pay had instead only kept pace with inflation, U.S. schools would have saved nearly $70 billion in 2019 — enough to give every teacher in America a $20,913 raise.***

Open the Books, Staff