Would YOU pay New York’s public school head double what the governor makes?

Photo above - PS 190, in New York City, is rated "one of the most dangerous schools in the nation" by neighborhoodscout.com. But it also was given a "Great Schools" award by NY state officials. If you don't understand how this can happen, read the novel Catch 22, by Joseph Heller.

Wow . . . Betty Rosa (NY school commissioner) just got a whopping $150,000 annual pay raise. This takes her annual salary to nearly $500,000. (see link below). Ms. Rosa snarked that she doesn’t get a housing allowance, so the raise was justified. The office of Governor Hochul, who makes half what commissioner Rosa takes home, did not return this reporter's calls for comment.

The champ for overpaid state bureaucrats is in California, of course. That would be Los Angele’s “water chief” who is paid $750,000 annually. She has no actual water experience, and her one of her first decisions was to drain a key reservoirs just weeks before the $150 billion fire broke out. As of this morning the Los Angeles, Palisades, and Eaton fires are still “not contained”. And water Chief Janisse Quinones is still collecting her three quarters of a million-dollar salary.

Is it worth it to pay the NY state education commissioner a half a million dollars a year? Before you answer that, please note that each school district and city also has their own superintendent of schools. Evidently the job of the state school commissioner in Albany is to “facilitate” what these hundreds of superintendents do. And before you ask, I am not getting snookered into doing a deep dive on how much all those superintendents make. And if the graduation rates in their school districts are getting better or worse. Suffice it to say, the state graduation rate is definitely getting worse.

Of course, just a couple years ago lots of kids didn’t even have to go to school. Because of Covid 19, they were given free laptops, and asked to log in for 1 hour a day of online instruction. But if they didn’t log in, they were promoted to the next grade anyway. So the drop in graduation rates may be directly tied to “unlimited promotions and graduations” policy during the pandemic.

Commissioner Rosa has been on the job since 2020, so whatever pandemic policies the state enacted probably should be laid at her doorstep. But at least Ms. Rosa wasn’t appointed to the position through cronyism. She worked her way up. She was originally a “bilingual” paraprofessional (teachers aide, no certificate). Now she has a PhD. You go girl. But you're still not worth double the governor, plus free housing.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

N.Y. Education Commissioner Betty A. Rosa justifies $155K pay raise