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Well, the DC Examiner did it again.  Their story about superintendents' compensation this morning bears the inflammatory headline, "Fat Cat Edu-crats: High Pay, Lavish Perks Enrich Schools Chiefs."  This just days after publishing "Local Teachers Are Cashing In," a story about the less than 2 percent of DC-area teachers who earn more than $100,000/year.

As Kevin Carey notes, the story about superintendent pay does acknowledge that the $200,000-$400,000 annual salaries of some local superintendents are not wholly unreasonable, given how "immensely difficult" their jobs are.  The article also notes that superintendent salaries seem slim indeed when compared with local CEO salaries, which can top $30 million.  Still, the headline tells an entirely different story.

One wonders why the "High Pay" and "Lavish Perks" of "Fat Cat Edu-crats" aren't enough to entice scads of new people into the superintendency.  Just yesterday, The Oklahoman reported disquieting findings from a recent American Association of School Administrators survey:

• Nearly 40 percent of superintendents plan to retire within five years; and
• Eighty-five percent of superintendents believe there are not enough enough candidates in the pipeline to fill vacancies left by these departing principals.

Such inconvenient facts about the difficult market for educators seldom trouble those who peddle the fiction that educators are growing fat off your hard-earned tax dollars.  Kevin Carey puts it best:

The vast majority of passers-by who glance at that [Headline in the Examiner] aren't going to flip through to page 4 to read the whole article.... They're just going to mentally file it away as one more piece of evidence that public education is inefficient and ridiculous, that the government is over-taxing them and wasting their money on feckless bureaucrats. They'll be a little more filled with unjustified anger toward the public sector.

As I've said earlier, this silliness about educators' pay seems particularly perverse at a time when even the most benighted education policy pundits acknowledge the critical importance of attracting and retaining the most effective teachers and leaders.

[Picture:  All4Humor.com]