A large school district superintendent in Texas makes an average salary of nearly $240,000.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott earns $150,000 a year, according to Ballotpedia, and that’s meager compared to some of the state’s school superintendents.
In Houston, Texas Education Agency data reported that Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District paid superintendent John Henry $406,484.
“Each district can determine what they pay their superintendent,” said Tera Collum, executive director of the Travis Institute of Education Policy, an education advocacy organization. “They think they’ll attract the best superintendent if they pay more money.”
Nationwide, the average salary of a superintendent is $117,216, according to data from the University of Texas at Arlington. That’s compared to $238,552 in Texas for a superintendent managing a student population of up to 24,000. Superintendents can expect to earn $97,270 for working at a district with fewer than 500 students.
In addition to lucrative salaries, some higher-paid superintendents are also scoring a housing allowance, car allowance and cell phone allowance, according to Collum.
“Each district is its own governmental entity,” she said in an interview. “They get their own taxes and so their school board sets salaries for all of the employees. Seventy-five percent of administrators are men, by the way.”
The first step to becoming a highly paid superintendent is training. The University of Texas at Arlington offers online superintendent certification.
Including charter schools there are 1,227 school districts in Texas, as previously reported in the Texas Tribune, and 5.1 million students. That’s not surprising considering the state is the second largest in land area in the U.S., behind only Alaska.
“It comes down to our larger school districts that have a lot more people paying taxes,” Collum told Education Daily Wire. “But they're not as successful as you would think they should be for the amount of money they're costing.”
Public school districts are rated annually by the state with a letter grade based on student test scores. For example, with total student enrollment of 116,245 at 87 schools, Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District reported a B letter grade overall, B for student achievement, A for school progress, and B for how well different populations of students in a district are performing.
"There are school districts that have a B or C rating and it may have multiple schools failing within the district," Collum said. "But a lot of them aren't scoring an A or B. Especially in larger districts, it would have to be a difficult job but I don't understand how it's more difficult than the job of the governor or lieutenant governor of the state."
The governor and lieutenant governor Dan Patrick are managing 29.9 million Texans, according to USA Population.
“There are school districts that have been able to perform really well on their testing and they may be a very small district with very few teachers but their students do good and their administrators, their superintendents, who may also be acting as principal, are still not making near what some of these other district superintendents are,” Collum said.
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