Blecher_onthe_Hudson t1_iu4y7vw wrote on October 28, 2022 at 4:09 PM

Reply to comment by SyndicalistCPA in Please explain like I'm 5: JCBOE election ballot by Affectionate-Buy2539

Just pointing out the lowest hanging fruit, even with bloated admin staff there's still a lot more teachers, that's where most of the money goes.

I have a mea culpa, I already admitted I'm not an Excel wiz, I was misreading the spreadsheet about which was the most recent data and quoted from 2019-20. But it raises more questions.

From file CSG3.xlsx at https://www.nj.gov/education/guide/2022/ind.shtml, The teachers salaries went from 85/92 in 2019-20, to 55/92 in 2021-22! That's quite a shift in a scenario with 92 datapoints. It says the actual cost per student dropped from $10,807 to $10,120. Seems way more likely to me they're cooking the books not cutting payroll. Are you actually a CPA? Do you know how to fix these files so they can be re-sorted?

SyndicalistCPA t1_iu5vmzi wrote on October 28, 2022 at 7:53 PM

Did you export the file onto your desktop? Not really sure what you want to accomplish

Blecher_onthe_Hudson t1_iu6bkbf wrote on October 28, 2022 at 9:46 PM

I'm trying to see how we spend more than anyone else in the nation on our school system. Sorting helps understand the context. Say we are near the top of our group in teacher salaries, but what if the group only varies by a few percent, then that's not conclusive of much, right? But without sorting by spending, that's hard to see.

I downloaded the files since they no longer allow you to view the data online as in the past.

SyndicalistCPA t1_iu6nhy5 wrote on October 28, 2022 at 11:19 PM

I'd have to know which file you are looking at but the one file I clicked already had filters on. Inside the filter you can sort by "largest to smallest". Not sure if that helps or how familiar you are with excel.

Blecher_onthe_Hudson t1_iu714g9 wrote on October 29, 2022 at 1:10 AM

Those filters do not apparently function in spreadsheets other than actual Excel, which is often not owned by people like me who have no reason to invest in the MS pro suite. In LibreOffice (open source) I get this error "Ranges containing merged cells can only be sorted without formats." I managed to get them to sort in Google Sheets, but not by those filters. So I need to download the files, then upload them to google!

Government agencies should not publish data in proprietary formats. Jersey City distributed a sheet about boiler inspections in a Word doc instead of a PDF! Yes, I know PDF is originally Adobe, but at this point there's many readers/writers and I've never had a problem with it. Word often has problems with interoperability, as apparently does Excel.

But, to get back to your inquiry as to why focus on teachers rather than bloated admin staff and salaries: teacher are 56% of the overall budget while admin is 8%. I shouldn't need to tell a CPA to follow the money!

Have you ever taken a look at the JCPS "user friendly budget"? I did. I found line item terms that Google couldn't define!