Reply to Tuition seem high?? Curious of the Salary of the Head of Your School? Do your research. Here is how.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I assume that one reason you are sending your child to a private school is for the quality of the experience. Perhaps even a world class educational experience. Always amazes me that people want an exceptional experience but think the leader of the organization should not be compensated as such. I promise you your head of school could make far more in a different role. [/quote]

I actually worry more about how well the teachers are being compensated. They are the ones doing the actual work of the school, not the HOS.

Happy teachers affect my child. Whether the HOS is there doesn’t have as much impact.

- parent AND teacher [/quote]

You must be an inexperienced teacher if you really think that the HOS doesn’t have an impact.  What do you think makes happy teachers?  You all sit here thinking that a HOS that works 12 months and does the hiring of teachers has it so much easier than them?  You have no clue and it’s gross that people come on here and claim that someone with essentially no days off and responsible for all major decisions within a school doesn’t deserve a high salary.  [/quote]

Nope. I’ve been teaching 25 years and I know who really sells the school: teachers. Are you really going to select a school based on the HOS or the teachers in the classroom? We both know the answer to that.

A HOS who makes 5-6X what the teachers make? That’s gross.

And what makes happy teachers? Being respected. The HOS has a hard job, but teachers do as well. We also work long hours during the school year, running the very programs that the HOS can sell to parents. We do the true work.

So if a teacher is at the school until 10pm cleaning up after a band concert or NHS ceremony, just to be back in their classroom at 6:30am prepping for the school day, should they be happy with their 60K? When the HOS who didn’t even show up to the event gets 300K? 
[/quote]

This debate boils down to markets and pay structures that apply to every industry. A great teacher is certainly underpaid. But they have been underpaid for years. Decades. Maybe longer? And when you ask yourself why, the answer is because they are the hirees and there are enough people willing and able to do the job for the amount of money it typically pays. HoS is a CEO position. The hirer. And there aren’t as many people willing to do what they do. And there are even fewer people that have the incredibly broad and unusual skill set to do it.  I don’t expect my answer to be satisfying. But it’s honest. [/quote]

But it is also out of date.

There aren’t a lot of people willing to teach anymore, especially since private school pay is lower than public. Having taught in both, I’m comfortable saying the expectations for teachers are higher in private schools. Private teachers, especially at well regarded schools, are expected to have advanced degrees in their content area AND they are expected to run multiple after-school activities related to this content. They also have to be curricula creators since they don’t use the purchased curricula of a public school. Creating curricula can be a full time job in itself, yet these teachers do it at home in the evenings after school obligations are over. It becomes a 60+ hour a week job, and the pay just isn’t keeping up with the expectations.

We used to get a tsunami of applications per opening in my department and we could be highly selective. Now we are lucky if we can find one good applicant. The last time we had a HOS opening, the interview process took months because so many people applied. Yes, $$ is a motivating or demotivating factor.

Schools thrive when they realize the life force of the building comes from the classroom, not the offices. The truth is a teacher makes more decisions during the day that sell the school than somebody in an office does. It’s in the curricula we develop, the high standards and expectations we set, the feedback we give on student work, the relationships we build with students in and out of the classroom, the extracurricular opportunities we provide, etc. When families talk, it’s about the impact the teachers make academically and on the school environment. [/quote]

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