On August 28, 2017, the Greenville News published an article on the salaries of many administrators in the Greenville County School District, my employer. I do not, however subscribe to the Greenville News and thus discovered the article two days later.
I will start this entry with a disclaimer. I hold no personal grudge against the Greenville News. Before reading this particular article, I have found their work to be as objective as a news organization can reasonably produce. In fact, not a single sentence written in this article could be considered opinion.
As a historian, however, I have spent years examining and evaluating sources. IN my current role as a 7th grade English teacher, I teach my students how to examine and evaluate that which they read. After all, words have power, even words which compose factual statements or are expressed in numbers rather than letters.
In this essay, I highlight a few examples of how statistics and numbers can be manipulated both by arrangement and by omission. These facts also carry additional overtones by way of word choice. I will quote the article heavily and will also include a link to the online version so all can see the complete edition.
The first line of the article also serves as the title. “More than 100 administrators earn six figure salaries in Greenville School District.” English grammatical convention expects that numbers ten and below should be written in words. Anything higher should be expressed in numerical format. Curiously, the author, Paul Hyde, chooses the connotation laden “six figure salaries” rather than, perhaps, “more than $100,000.”
Mr. Hyde then continues to add up the numbers of the salaries of the top 100 employees. Anyone capable of basic math could figure out that 100 $100k salaries would total $10 million. Obviously, a lot of money in the Greenville County School District is allocated for salaries, a foregone conclusion for a school district this large. The district employees 10,000 people. Next, Mr. Hide points out that none of the district’s 4,000 teachers make a six figure salary. This fact is also common knowledge based on the publicly available salary schedules on the district website. (I have included the link below.) By placing this fact directly after the statement concerning the $10 million total for administrator salaries, Mr. Hyde implies that administrators earn far too much money. Nowhere does he acknowledge the fact that the increased responsibility of administrators on all levels which should indicate increased compensation. The only caveat Mr. Hyde presents is that “teachers often work on 190-day contracts while many administrators are contracted for 245 days.” Even this fact obscures the reality that both teachers and administrators work far more hours than stipulated by the contract without additional compensation.
Then there is the numbers presentation that first brought this article to my attention. As I mentioned earlier, the author presents the number of 4,000 teachers. Only a few paragraphs later, the author states, “[m]ore than 3,300 Greenville County Schools teachers and administrators make $50,000 annually or above.” This number unfairly lumps together two sets of employees paid on completely different salary schedules and thus implies that many teachers also earn too much. (I will address this further in the next paragraph.” In fact, a teacher with a bachelor’s degree would have to work 17 years to earn above $50,000, a teacher with a bachelor’s + 18 credits, 15 years, a Master’s 11 years, a Master’s + 30 credits, 8 years and a Doctorate, 4 years. Most teachers enter the profession with a bachelors. By comparison, an administrator almost always earns above $50,000. Only the administrators at the lowest level of responsibility with the least amount of experience earn below that mark. After three years, all administrators earn more than $50,000.
Mr. Hyde next presents median household income in South Carolina as well as per capita income in the state. These numbers, $47,238 and $25,627 respectively, are both invalid comparisons for the following reasons. First, the population sets compared do not match. Both numbers include all households in South Carolina, not just the households with earners that hold at least a 4 year degree, a requirement for all teachers and administrators. The per capita number includes ever person of working age, those 15 years and older. Per federal law, minors are not permitted to work full time jobs which dramatically lowers the per capita number. This population also includes those who do not work. All people employed as teachers or administrators obviously are gainfully employed.
The article concludes by listing each of the top 25 earners in the district by name also giving their job title and annual gross salary. I have long known that my pay as a government employee is public knowledge. Why do taxpayer funded positions not deserve the same right to privacy, should they want it, as anyone that works in the private sector? Granted, my personal salary could be discovered only if I either told the amount or someone knew my education level and years of experience. These 25 people did not even have that much privacy.
This leads me to my fundamental issue with this article. Why? Why did Paul Hyde write this article and the others focused on the other upstate school districts administrative salaries? In the Facebook responses to this article, when people asked this question, Mr. Hyde and the Greenville News repeatedly responded that they had a moral obligation to “shine a light” on the allocation of taxpayer funding. When anyone can access all of these pay schedules any time on the district website, I fail to see the need for anyone to “shine a light” This “light” ends up becoming a blinking strobe light in a fully lit room, blinding anyone who looks in that direction.
This article creates a distorted picture not through inaccurate or false facts but by careful juxtaposition and omission. I end with a two-fold plea. First, to Paul Hyde and the Greenville News, as journalists, please strive to maintain objectivity in your facts as well as in your presentation. Second, to the reader, read deeply. Examine the text. Ask why. Only then will you understand the whole story.