The Governor of Mississippi is paid $160,000 a year. At least 34 school district superintendents make more than that.
Every year, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy publishes our Fat Cat report — a look at the highest-paid public officials in the state. This year’s edition is out, and for the first time it doesn’t just sit in a PDF. It lives online as an interactive tool you can search yourself. Type in your district and see what your superintendent is paid — and what your district gets in return.
The picture that emerges is not flattering.
High pay does not buy high performance. The highest-paid superintendent in the state runs Jackson Public Schools — $280,000 a year for a C-rated district. DeSoto County, the largest district in Mississippi and rated A, pays its superintendent less.
Measure it on value for money and the gap grows starker. Divide a superintendent’s salary by the district’s accountability score, and you get the cost to taxpayers per grade point. On that measure, Wilkinson County’s superintendent costs taxpayers roughly 95 times more per grade point than DeSoto’s. Wilkinson County has 694 students and an F rating.
Nor is Wilkinson an outlier. Small districts, big salaries — it is a pattern repeated across the state. Yazoo City pays its superintendent $183,500 to run an F-rated district with fewer than 2,000 students enrolled. Mississippi maintains 141 school districts, 103 of which enroll fewer than 3,000 students. Fifty enroll fewer than 1,500. Each one has its own highly paid superintendent.
Add it all up and superintendent pay comes to $20.4 million a year — an average of about $145,000, or three and a half times what a starting teacher makes. And at the top of the pyramid, the State Superintendent in Jackson is paid $300,000 — nearly twice what the Governor makes.
Defenders of the status quo will say you get what you pay for — that running a school district is a demanding job, and attracting talent requires competitive pay. If that were true, the highest salaries would sit atop the best-performing districts. They don’t.
You might not be surprised to learn that school superintendents are keen to retain control over their multimillion-dollar budgets — and have been among the most opposed to giving parents more power through school choice. They want to prevent your family from having the choices that families in neighboring Arkansas, Tennessee, and Alabama now have. You only need to read our Fat Cat report to start to see why.
So, what should be done?
Some of it has already been attempted. This year the Mississippi House voted unanimously to cap superintendent pay at 250 percent of a comparable teacher’s salary. Unanimously — every Republican and every Democrat. The Senate let the bill die in committee.
Our report sets out seven reforms. Some are simple transparency: every superintendent’s salary should be published online each year, without anyone needing to file a public records request to find it. Some would link pay to performance and district size. And some ask a more basic question — why do 103 districts with fewer than 3,000 students each need their own highly paid superintendent in the first place?
None of this is an attack on public education — quite the opposite. Money spent on administration is money not spent in the classroom. Every superintendent salary of $300,000 could instead pay for more than seven starting teachers.
Transparency is where reform starts. That is why we built this year’s report as a tool anyone can use, rather than a document that gathers dust on a shelf.
It’s your money paying these salaries. You ought to know where it goes.
Mississippi Center for Public Policy President Douglas Carswell authored this post. The interactive Fat Cat Report is available at mspolicy.org.
This post is a paid advertisement.
48 comments:
A good number of state employees make more than the governor, because the governor's salary is fixed by legislation. I'd argue this means governors are underpaid rather that some indictment that other positions are overpaid.
Fat Cats-
But it's for the children.
Let's talk about university professors making $200K+ for teaching two or three classes while conducting "research" -- and having the summer off on a 9-month contract. Superintendents get the publicity but the real issue is at the university level.
" The Senate let the bill die in committee"
Superintendent pay comes around every few years and nothing happens. Paul Gallo or whatever his name was on the mornings on Supertalk FM was harping about superintendent pay and the need for school district consolidation 25 years ago. some things never change
None of this is an attack on public education — quite the opposite. Money spent on administration is money not spent in the classroom.
Every superintendent salary could instead pay for more teachers.
Consolidate!!
Why didn't they grade the governor's salary against the state's performance?
The governor position isn’t about the the current paycheck, it’s about the experience to make a much larger future salary. It is basically an unpaid internship preparing them for their real career as lobbyists making 7 figures.
The Governor also receives housing and transportation as part of his compensation.
I don't have a problem with the superintendent of Wilkinson County schools making six figures. You couldn't pay me that to live there and do that job.
A point of resentment for underpaid teachers, but what can they do or say?
Every time they tell you, "it's for the children," it is a lead pipe cinch that the children are the last consideration.
Or grade the Superintendent's salary against the district's performance.
Governors are simply politicians willing to spend millions and millions of dollars to get and keep that 160K job. So probably not the best job to compare.
More money for education
There’s going to be a lot of sour grapes in this thread but the reality is some of us just deserve a higher salary. It isn’t my fault you don’t value your time. I do value my time and that value is equal to $500 an hour.
We don't pay teachers a living wage. Teachers are spouses with multi incomes or have to live at a poverty level.
Outside of Haley, I don't recall a governor worth 100K per year.
Some of this is reasonable. But MCPP gives away its true intent, which is starving public education and replacing it with segregation academies, by advocating capping superintendent pay. The only rationale for that is that you actively want public schools to have low quality leadership.
Nobody thinks we should cap the salary for football coaches at Ole Miss or MSU at some multiple of the equipment manager's salary. If the coach wins, it's always worth the money. Similarly, if a superintendent moves the needle on student outcomes even a little (from a C to a B district rating for example) that's potentially life changing progress for thousands of kids, and absolutely deserves a high six figure salary.
We can all agree with cutting waste in bureaucracies, but MCPP will only ever push for cuts that cripple governments. Because it's not really waste they care about. If it were, they'd be acutely interested in the thousands of ways we subsidize millionaire private CEOs.
No, MCPP's goal is removing the ability of government to negotiate better outcomes for regular people. To make sure you sit alone across the table from corporations, and are wholly at the mercy of the oligarchs and corporations that fund groups like theirs.
College professor here: you have no idea what you’re talking about. A minuscule fraction of college teachers make that much in Mississippi. Shut up.
1:31 Wilkinson County is paradise in the countryside. Who are you kidding?
Superintendent salaries are set by the school boards -- it's a local decision. Some districts pay insane salaries to get someone, anyone, to take the job. Some do it because of local politics. Some do it as a reward for achievement. But it is a decision made by local authorities. The Legislature is not eager to take that power away from locals and give it to the State.
Also, those local boards aren't thinking one bit about school choice when they set superintendent salaries.
Yeah. When someone says “It’s for the children.” Or, “Let me be clear.” RUN
Consolidate, combine MS's tiny counties into fewer mega counties as big as Rankin. Then consolidate school districts and government. Then let parents choose their kids' schools. Poor schools should lose funding, some should be rewarded for performance, by giving voucher accounts to follow the students to the schools chosen by parents. Private schools can accept or reject applicants based on testing, and even if accepted, parents must come up with large balance payments after paying the $8,000 +/- of the voucher accounts.
"I don't have a problem with the superintendent of Wilkinson County schools making six figures. You couldn't pay me that to live there "
Beavis : I want to move to Woodviile ... Huh, huh ... snort.
Butt-Head : Shut up dumb ass, we're not going to Wilkinson County.
Beavis: Uhhh ..but we could get rich ... uhhh ... in the shcool system.
Highly compensated CEO's have typically shown Leadership,Positive Results,Ability to motivate the Organization etc to justify their Compensation. Many of the Superintendents discussed here obviously haven't been very good at producing Positive Results for the Children---
Many good thoughts above. First of all we do not need this many school districts. Some counties could be consolidated into one school district having two counties in one district. Some counties may need more than one school district due to population.
I could see 30 or 40 districts eliminated and then pay the teachers more money with money saved from cutting districts. Number of school districts has been a joke for years.
I don't think any college coach should be paid more than the lowest-paid full professor (before they inflate the professor's pay to prop up the coaches).
Jackson Public School kids can’t read, write, add or think independently. In addition, statically they are extremely violent. Yet, that superintendent makes 300k. Yes, you get what you pay for. And JPS gets the ignorant students they deserve.
The Governor, and other state leaders are probably underpaid, but that's not the point.
Examine the salaries of CEOs of companies with as many employees and complex organizational structures like school districts and you'll see the private sector pays a lot more. Good superintendents are probably worth even more than they are paid. But, we have a severe shortage of capable leaders in this state, so many are paid per the market rate, when they probably shouldn't be on the position at all.
Speaking of complexity and responsibility aligned with compensation, per the federal 990 form for the MCPP, Carswell received $178,380 in 2025.
@2:40 - touchy subject, and I hope you are not a lawyer because in my years of experience dealing with those guys, while there are some that truly deserve that $500 per hour charge, there are many young lawyers who honestly do better work than a good percentage of the $500 per hour "experienced" lawyers. True life examples - (1) $500 per hour for lawyers caught using AI to reference cases that did not exist, (2) $500 per hour lawyers billing more than 24 hours in a day (on a Saturday during football season, no less, while they were at the ball game) and (3) young lawyer in his 3rd year of practice winning an appeal at the State Supreme Court on a case where the $500 per hour lawyer thought "he was so smart". You don't always get what you pay for.
Alabama's President said that Nick Saban was the best investment in the history of the school. A buddy of mine's daughter was at Bama when they hired Saban, after his hire enrollment more than doubled. I personally know of kids from other states who wanted to pay the higher out of state tuition to come to Bama because of Saban. I have never heard of a kid with the same desire because of a psychology or sociology professor. I don't care for college football nor basketball, but I do know a bit about economics.
Sigh, the subject that Mississippians are too stupid to understand, nor strong enough to get angry enough about because they really just don't care about how their money is wasted "for the children".
The entire Mississippi K-12 and IHL systems are a defacto facilitator of washing BILLIONS in federal tax dollars throughout the state. It is the largest single employer in the state, and thus the largest voting bloc. But due to the terroristic management of the administrators from Supes/Presidents on down - NO ONE will speak up about the level of corruption that demands you keep your mouth shut about the level of exploitation of tax dollars hidden from the truth about chronic absenteeism, and zero behavioral control in the systems. They won't talk about why there's a teacher shortage for fear of exposing the lie. There is only the holding up of the systems to protect Cheryl Lynn's and/or Billy Ray's job - and of course to lead young people they've actually accomplished an education, when all they had to do was show up and turn something - anything - in, whenever they feel like it.
Hoseman scratched the surface on the subject of attendance recently, but it's waaaaay, WAY worse than what he reported.
The entire educational system is completely bogus. Here's a story from a suspended teacher in Nashville yesterday:
Samira Hardcastle: I was Teacher of the Year at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Antioch this past year and Blue Ribbon Teacher of the Year for the district. What you have in front of you right now is my resignation letter. I resigned in May. You can read those three pages at your leisure, but I’ve heard a lot of positive data in this meeting, and I just wanted to give you some facts from my firsthand experience.
So, first, district leaders asked me to fabricate grades for a parent who sat in the office for hours until her daughter’s failing grades were changed.
It creates false entitlement. What happens when these kids lie, cheat, and cry their way through school and end up as future doctors, police, or politicians? When will you protect the future of our society?
Second, that same parent has harassed over 30 teachers. Teachers have filed police reports, and entire schools have had restraining orders against her, yet she’s still allowed on school property, showing up to field trips her child didn’t earn and filming other students.
When will you stop prioritizing parents’ feelings over the safety of our teachers and our students?
I heard you also mentioned that we’re closing gaps in teacher vacancies. I want the public to know that many of those are filled with uncertified teachers.
My third point: HR withheld money from my employee paycheck, as well as many others. They took $500 from me specifically, and it put me behind on my mortgage. And then they sent out an email saying that they had to do it to pay other employees. When will you pay teachers what they are owed?
My fourth point: The news reports that behavioral issues are down. They are not. We are simply banned from reporting them, forcing us to keep disruptive students in the classroom.
Statistics are being skewed to protect the district, not our children. Our children cannot read and write. They cannot do basic math. And we spend 40 hours a week with these students, so we know them better than the district and those fake numbers.
Or “Make no mistake.”
Well, I, for one, am willing to fork over the big money for anyone working in our government-run daycare-for-all system that is the envy of the world.
College professor here too, and I agree the salaries for some faculty and administrators are very bloated. Maybe you need to shut up and go teach your two students?
Consolidate the Districts. Reduce the overhead, increase the production (pay good teachers more).
The salaries we pay our state elected officials is not based on common sense but political jealously by legislators. Also, For someone making $50.000 a year a $250,000 salary seems excessive, so the general public in that range wants to keep the salary low probably because they don't understand business. The Governor is similar to a CEO of a big business. The LT. Governor is similar to the Chairman of the board. The AG is similar to a managing partner of a law firm. The Treasurer is similar to a bank president. They should be paid accordingly. That would be a drop in the bucket compared to the state budget. Why would a person that is very capable of good management and getting paid well consider taking the State jobs? Unless you come from wealth, with the exception of Fell who made more money that his deputy sheriff job. I don't know how Mayor Horne can pay for all the suits he has to wear on his measly salary.
I remember back when a Junior College president's job was considered the best job to have across the education spectrum. Housing, automobile, offices, utilities, lawn care, no requirement for public or other appearances, automatic job for the wife (if she wanted one), what am I missing.
Now it's intimidating the entire faculty and staff to keep their mouths shut - except to pretend you want cheerlead or say only positive things - especially if you want to keep your job. It's simply a protected "arm of the government" Ponzi scheme for the Federal Financial Aid dollars to fund little fiefdoms around the state. Young people ain't learning shit, but lots of dollars are getting spread around until everyone gets their high four years. It's a cut-throat operation....believe it.
Our Governor is obviously overpaid.
If you pay tenured, liberal college teachers a healthy salary and they actually are required to show up four times a week for an hour, in the long run, the math tells us they're clocking $54,000 per annum.
11:16 the only thing you’re missing with the perks of the Junior College president is that they don’t get fired for having a losing football team.
Help me follow that math.
Warren County School District Superintendent is paid over $180,000 and the school district is pityful. Can’t find money from a $3 million deficit! All need to be replaced especially s hook board !!!!!!
Look at the supe's job in Desoto County. Nobody leaves that job until retirement and the one who is now retired is clocking in 300k a year, minimum, on PERS.
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