Statistics Never Lie, But........

A few weeks ago, back when dissenting opinions were still allowed to be posted to the district's Fiscal Conversations blog, rumblings were heard about how cuts needed to start at the top, i.e. at the D.O. level, before cuts should be considered at the classroom level.

The district's response to such rumblings came in the form of two "studies" one conducted by the Patterson School District comparing D.O. staffing levels of 16 area school districts. Predictably, Sylvan came out tops with the lowest Admin / Pupil ratio, at 1/911. 911 is an appropriate number, because this "study" should raise some alarms. A cursory inspection of the websites of the other school districts in the study reveals that perhaps some numerical manipulation has taken place.

For example, Turlock has 14 D.O. level administrators, not 16 as the study claims. They also have an ADA of 13,796. (Higher than the 13,003 on the study) That correction changes Turlock's revised Admin / Pupil ratio to 1/985, which would put Turlock ahead of Sylvan. Think about it another way, they have 5,596 more students than Sylvan, yet only need 5 more admistrators than SUSD. If Sylvan used Turlock's ratio, there would only be 8 administrators residing at the D.O. on Sylvan Ave.

Staying with the Patterson survey, let's look at Ceres Unified School District. With an enrollment of 11,995 they have 12 administrators, not the 14 the study claims. Their ratio of Admin / Pupil is close to 1/1,000 - nowhere near the 1/813 listed in the Patterson study.

Now let's look at the other study on the Sylvan blog, entitled "Similar School Org. Chart Comparison." First of all, the link on the main blog page is broken, making it impossible to view the tantalizingly named study. To see it, you have to go to Downloads Home to find the backdoor link to the document. Once there, you'll see Sylvan again not so surprisingly compares quite favorably to other school districts from such exotic locales as Salinas, Roseville, Hueneme and Berryessa.

I am going to guess (assume, hope?) that an effort was made to pick eight other school districts with ADA numbers as close as possible to that of Sylvan, you know, to make the comparison as fair and accurate as possible.

A quick visit to Ed-Data and a search of comparable (+/- 5% of 8,217 ADA) school districts brought up some familiar names from the SUSD report like Hueneme, Berryessa, South Bay and Greenfield. However, you have to widen the ADA net to 10% to find the other three schools on the SUSD report, Salinas, Roseville and Delano.

Lincoln Unified School District in Stockton was left off the SUSD study list. Could it be because that they somehow manage to get by with four (4) administrators despite having an ADA of 8,572? Doesn't make Sylvan look very efficient, now does it?