I enjoy myself a good Dilbert cartoon, like the one above. In fact, all the ones that come up under a search for “executive compensation” are pretty funny. (I’m going to start requesting a strong pony if I ever have enough leverage to be in a “salary negotiation” again.) But if we’re going to answer the question, “Is Mike Miles underpaid,” we need a few more market data points than number of stars users rated a particular Dogbert bit.
FWIW: When I’ve asked various interested parties in Dallas if Miles is underpaid, the answers ranged from “technically, of course,” to “he can straight-up go eff himself.” I’m no mathemagician, but I think there’s noise in that data set.
Let’s just look at his contract. Mike Miles makes $306,000 when you factor in his $6k annual gas reimbursement. There are other bonuses there for staying til 2017 (good luck!) and meeting some student achievement goals, but let’s stick to base for now.
Let’s compare that to 545 other districts in the state, using this handy TEA tool. That gives us the following spreadsheet, which I’ve filtered by “pay per student”:
The takeaways are obvious:
1. It’s good to be the Super in Malone ISD. Well done, Linda Buffe!
2. Mike Miles is paid the second-least per student in the state, just ahead of the Super in Houston ISD.
So what, you say! Houston and Dallas are so much larger than every other ISD, they only compare to each other. Well, I didn’t hear you making that argument when you said $185k was too much for Miles to pay his communication chief (the exact same at the time as Houston Comm chief), but okay! Let’s roll with it. What can we compare Dallas ISD to?
How about let’s say Mike Miles is really the CEO of a $1.5 billion company with nearly 20k employees? That work?
Then let’s go to the handy salary wizard at Salary.com and run some numbers. (They make it hard to copy and embed the results. Just make yourself an account, search for CEO, and run it yourself.)
Right now, the median salary of a CEO in the U.S. is about $740k.
But that’s not relevant, you say. That includes all those five-person Silicon Valley startups where the CEO makes a quadrillion then bails before the company tanks. Fair enough.
Let’s adjust the filters for companies with between 15k and 50k employees. We come up with a median base salary of $1.14 million.
Whoa, wrong direction! Let’s just look at CEOs in related fields that have cost caps on them because they deal in public monies. Fine: We employ a filter for education, government, and nonprofit jobs and we get a median income of $487K.
All of which tells us what, exactly? Only that the idea that Miles is underpaid relative to other Supers in Texas and relative to other CEOs in the industry holds water. Now, there may be good reasons for that — past rocky performance, blah blah blah — which I’m sure folks on the board will give us during contract discussions in the coming weeks. I’m just saying the market suggests it’s reasonable that he’s asking for more.
