New Jersey’s Many Types of Teachers, Administrators and Staff

Education, Policy — By on March 21, 2011 at 4:52 PM

by Mark ‘Jay’ Williams, Economics Fellow

The use of statistics is a routine and important part of the policy making process, but too often the repetition of a generalized statistic lulls advocates, legislators and the press into false assumptions.

One of the most misused variables is ‘teacher’, particularly when describing the entire population of certificated staff teachers and other certificated professionals in our K12 education system. There are many types of teachers, and understanding their distribution is particularly important when large-scale policy decisions are considered.

The following is a review of the 2010 Certificated Staff data, which was acquired from the New Jersey Department of Education. This is intended only as a simple overview of the types of certificated staff, and their average of experience and salary.

The Data for All Certificated Staff

• Last year, 144,083 certificated staff worked in New Jersey’s public (including charter) K12 education system. Of this total, approximately 435 staff had missing coding for some measurement variables.

• There are 9,025 administrators, 534 bilingual teachers, 114,077 general education teachers, 344 teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing, 57 teachers of the blind and visually impaired, and 19,611 teachers of students with disabilities;

• 23% of certificated staff were male, 77% female, and 61 were not coded;

• 85% are white, 8% black, 4% Hispanic, 1% Asian, 1% American Indian, and the remaining 1% Hawaiian and two-or-more-races;

• 51% have a Bachelor’s degree, 46% hold a Master’s, 2% a Doctorate, while 835 have ‘other’ degree, and 419 have ‘no’ degree;

• 94% are 10-month employees; 1% are 11-month, and 5% are 12-month;

• 11% are ‘alternate route’ and 89% are ‘traditional route’;

• Only 800 are National Board Certified, and 136,027 are not (7,256 no response);

• Among the 143,130 staff with ‘highly qualified’ coding,  23% “doesn’t need to be”, 45% passed the ‘Praxis/NTE’, 15% by the ‘house matrix’, 5% has ’30 credits in content area’, 6% has graduate degree in ‘subject area’, and less than 1% are ‘nationally board certified’.

Title-Specific Certificated Staff

The following table is self-explanatory. For purposes of convenience, some non-instructional titles were combined, such as Educational Services (which includes librarians, therapists, psychologists, interpreters and specialists). Note that elementary teachers were not sub-categorized for math, language and science, which would account for less than 1,400 teachers (3%). Also, middle school and high school teachers sub-categorization of ‘general’ math, English and science is identified, although each of these subjects have ‘other’ content categories (e.g., high school math-other includes business, remedial and computers, and science-other includes biological, chemistry, and physics).

Certificated Staff in New Jersey Public Schools

TitleTotalExperience -DistrictExperience - NJExperience TotalAverage SalaryAverage Age
Superintendent/CSA5899.524.927.7$157,35357
Admin Asst to Superintendent331523.224.8$139,78156
Interim Superintendent175.429.631.4$126,69866
School Business Administrator576713.413.8$114,01453
Asst. School Business Administrator505.27.67.6$85,02346
Asst Superintendent23716.524.825.8$152,39556
Director76913.621.922.9$121,11154
Supervisor 2,288 1520.821.69$107,76352
Principal/Asst Principal 4,109 1419.920.6$116,13650
Non-Supervisory Coordinator358163919.219.6$86,13450
Pre-School Teacher 2,669 7.99.59.7$59,35343
Elementary Teacher 40,429 10.912.212.5$63,63144
Middle School-Math Teacher 3,186 910.610.9$62,03243
Middle School-Science Teacher 1,936 10.111.812.1$63,82345
Middle School Language Teacher 3,536 9.911.511.9$62,75043
Other Middle School Teacher 1,883 10.91212.2$63,48244
English Teacher 5,740 9.611.111.5$64,27843
English-Other Teacher 4,154 13.315.215.7$70,09550
Math Teacher 5,266 911.111.5$65,98744
Math-Other Teacher 1,493 13.715.415.8$68,32049
Science Teacher77410.312.613.1$67,91848
Science-Other Teacher 3,999 8.710.811.3$67,94145
Art Teacher 3,271 11.112.612.9$64,05646
Business Teacher 1,217 11.213.313.5$67,79149
World Language Teacher 4,628 8.11010.6$63,25546
Health/Phys Ed Teacher 7,068 12.413.914.2$66,14144
Home Economics Teacher79913.516.717.1$71,82254
Industrial Arts Teacher 1,130 14.117.317.6$74,15850
Music Teacher Teacher 3,701 1113.614$65,83545
Social Studies Teacher 4,412 9.610.911.2$64,46643
Vocational Education Teacher 1,113 9.710.911.1$66,11451
School Counselor 4,185 12.715.816.5$75,15648
Supplemental Instruction/Resource/Coach 12,521 9.611.511.9$63,32444
Educational Services 14,994 10.313.514$71,40350

 

Conclusions

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate to the reader that the title ‘teacher’ and ‘certificated staff’ is really a combination of many different job titles. In viewing the chart, some trends can be easily identified:

• Most teachers spend nearly their entire career in one district, and their entire career in New Jersey;

• There are only 287 Assistant Superintendents and Assistant Business Administrators, but three-times as many Directors;

• There are 2,288 Supervisors, but only 4,109 Principals/Assistant Principals. All three of these functions are responsible for staff evaluations;

• There are only 10,400 math teachers in elementary through high school, but we have more than 7,000 music/art and 7,000 Physical Education teachers;

• There are a significant number of Supplemental Instruction/Resource/Teacher Coach and Educational Services positions, accounting for almost 20% of certificated staff.

Author

Mark ‘Jay’ Williams is an Economics Fellow at the Common Sense Institute of New Jersey, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing free-market solutions to the public policy challenges facing New Jersey.

 

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