Education: Too Many?

The Virginia Board of Education is taking an appropriately deliberate approach to the matter of capping funding for support-staff ratios in the public schools. Lawmakers and Gov. Tim Kaine agreed this year to cap funding for a ratio of support personnel to instructional personnel -- i.e., teachers -- of roughly 1:4. The question is whether to make such a policy permanent.

Support staff play an important role. A theater needs more than just actors; it needs property masters, costume designers, ticket agents, and so on. A school system likewise needs support personnel -- sometimes lots of them. But in recent years the growth in the number of support personnel such as department heads and curriculum specialists has outpaced the growth in the number of teachers. The question is whether this has led to any improvement in services, or is mere bureaucratic bloat. We suspect the latter.

The Virginia Education Association opposes the cap. Because its most likely reason for doing so is self-interest, the VEA is repeating the misleading statistic that Virginia ranks 37th in the nation for state spending per pupil. That looks bad until you realize that Virginia's per-pupil expenditures are almost precisely equivalent to the national average. Why the discrepancy? Because of local contributions. In some states, the bulk of funding comes from the state level. In others, such as Virginia, localities contribute significant sums.

To complicate the picture, school districts categorize differently. Employees such as teachers' aides or reading specialists might be counted as instructional personnel in one district but support personnel in another. More clarity in this regard would be helpful.

Yet head-count clarity does not resolve the underlying issue. Whether one-to-four constitutes the ideal proportion is open to reasonable debate. Whether the state should take firmer steps to ensure that school systems do not have too high an officers-to-troops ratio should not be.