Question – Why are we letting people who live above the struggle of financial hardship make decisions for those trapped inside it?”
When a school district’s superintendent earns nearly seven times what the average family brings home, we’re not merely looking at numbers on a spreadsheet; we’re witnessing a fundamental disconnect between those who make decisions and those who experience the consequences. In Cleveland, this divide has grown so wide that it threatens the foundation of public education’s promise to serve all children, regardless of their families’ financial circumstances.
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s executive leadership team faces a financial reality that starkly contrasts with the daily struggles of the families whose children fill their classrooms. While the CEO/Superintendent earns approximately $300,000 annually—plus a generous package of perks—and his leadership team members earn salaries between $150,000 and $200,000, the average Cleveland family with school-age children survives on roughly $45,000, often needing multiple jobs to keep the lights on and food on the table.
This isn’t just about envy over salaries or resentment toward success. This concerns leaders who have become so detached from the economic realities of their communities that they can no longer make decisions that address the urgent needs of the families they are meant to serve.
The Daily Reality of CMSD Families
Walk through any neighborhood in Cleveland where CMSD students reside, and you’ll meet families facing impossible choices every single day.
- Parents work two, sometimes three jobs, racing between shifts to pick up children from after-school programs they rely on because private childcare is a luxury they simply cannot afford.
- You’ll meet teenagers who should be focusing on homework or exploring their talents through extracurricular activities but instead clock in at after-school jobs because their family’s survival depends on every available dollar.
These families aren’t asking for handouts; they’re seeking a school system that understands their realities and makes decisions accordingly. They need strong after-school programs because they’re working when school lets out. They require transportation assistance because reliable vehicles are often out of reach.
They want their children’s schools to be comprehensive community resources, not just academic institutions that operate in isolation from the broader challenges of economic hardship.
The Ivory Tower Perspective
Meanwhile, CMSD’s executive leadership operates from a completely different realm. When your annual salary surpasses the median household income of your community by over 550%, it becomes nearly impossible to grasp the weight of certain decisions:
- A $50 increase in school fees may seem minor, but it’s a significant burden for struggling families.
- Cutting after-school programs has devastating consequences for student safety, academic performance, and family stability.
- Changes to transportation force working parents into impossible choices between income and school access.
The tragic irony is that while projecting significant deficits for the coming years, this same leadership team continues to authorize expenditures on items that would be laughable if they weren’t so insulting to struggling families: unnecessary travel, expensive furniture upgrades (with systems that can cool your butt), consultant fees that could fund entire programs, and conferences and retreats that cost more than many families earn in months.
These aren’t investments in student outcomes but in executive comfort, funded by cuts to the programs families desperately need.
The Consequence Cascade
When school leaders are so disconnected from the realities of the community, the consequences aren’t abstract—they’re painfully real:
- Families face a heartbreaking dilemma: continue sending their children to increasingly under-resourced public schools or make financial sacrifices to access charter schools that may provide what CMSD is cutting.
- Teenagers forsake academic and social development opportunities to join the workforce too early, not out of a desire for independence, but because their families rely on their income for survival.
- Families are pushed to consider charter schools or other costly alternatives simply because CMSD no longer meets their basic needs.
This dynamic harms families and undermines the basic premise of public education as a cornerstone of community development and economic mobility.
When public school leadership is so detached from the community’s economic realities that it consistently prioritizes executive perks over student programming, we witness the slow-motion collapse of a vital democratic institution.
The “Competitive Compensation” Myth
When faced with questions about executive salaries, CMSD leadership often resorts to the defense of “competitive compensation,” the argument that high salaries are necessary to attract and retain top talent. This reasoning may be valid in districts managing hundreds of thousands of students across vast metropolitan areas like New York City, Chicago, or Boston, where superintendents oversee complex systems with large budgets and extensive bureaucracies.
Cleveland is not New York. CMSD serves about 38,000 students across roughly 100 schools, a significant responsibility, but hardly comparable to the scale and complexity of America’s largest urban districts. When districts with ten times the student population and far more complex operational challenges pay superintendents similar salaries, Cleveland’s compensation structure appears fundamentally misaligned with the district’s size and community context.
More importantly, compensation should never be determined solely by “competitiveness.” True value-based compensation reflects the measurable impact a leader brings to the organization and the results they deliver for the community they serve. Cleveland families have a right to ask: What transformational outcomes justify these salaries?
The community isn’t experiencing significant improvements in graduation rates, test scores, or college readiness that would justify such high compensation levels. They’re not observing innovative programs that other districts are eager to replicate. Instead, they’re facing program cuts, transportation challenges, and resource shortages while leadership continues to receive salaries that would be generous even in districts serving twice as many students with considerably better outcomes.
When the Superintendent, Chief of Equity and Culture, Chief Academic Officer, and other leadership team members earn salaries that dwarf the incomes of the families they serve, the burden of proof falls on them to show the extraordinary value they are delivering. The Cleveland community deserves to see results that match the investment, not just promises of what competitive salaries might theoretically attract.
A Question of Priorities and Leadership
The measure of educational leadership isn’t found in the comfort of executive offices or the prestige of administrative salaries. It’s found in the daily question every decision-maker should ask: “How does this choice impact the families who trust us with their children’s futures?”
Cleveland’s school families aren’t demanding that their leaders take vows of poverty. Still, they deserve leaders who understand that every dollar spent on executive comfort is not invested in the programs and services that make the difference between a child’s success and struggle. They deserve leaders who recognize that true educational excellence cannot be achieved when the system’s decision-makers live in economic isolation from the community they serve.
The $300,000 question isn’t whether CMSD’s superintendent and leadership team deserve competitive compensation; it’s whether they can justify earning multiples of their community’s income while making cuts that force families into impossible choices.
So again, Clevelanders must ask: “Why are we still letting people who live above the struggle of financial hardship make decisions for those trapped inside it?”
If our school leaders don’t live the reality, how can they be trusted to lead it?