HARRISBURG (TNS) — Brad Hatch grew up near Altoona and started his career as a teacher in the local school district, working his way up to assistant principal, then assistant superintendent.

Then in 2023, after 26 years in the district, Hatch was named superintendent of the Altoona Area School District, where he oversees nearly 7,000 students, two-thirds of whom are economically disadvantaged, and earns a salary of $153,000.

Brian Long is the chief administrative officer for Bucks County Montessori Charter School where he has spent his 23-year education career. Long oversees around 180 students, none of whom are economically disadvantaged. Long receives $175,428 in salary.

Hatch earns less money than Long — despite being responsible for thousands more students and having more educational experience.

Some of the discrepancy could be explained by a few unique circumstances: Hatch is still working on his doctorate degree. Long has unique experience in the Montessori educational approach and works in Bucks County where the median salary is more than twice as high as in Altoona.

Still, their salaries follow a pattern that is typical of the compensation for charter CEOs and district superintendents across Pennsylvania. A PennLive analysis of salary data found charter school CEOs earn higher salaries than their public school counterparts in similar-sized districts even when they have the same level of experience on average. But despite their higher salaries, Charter school CEOs tend to have less education experience and serve fewer students than district superintendents.

The median charter school CEO, for example, earns $153,000 to run a charter school with fewer than 600 students. The median superintendent runs a district with more than three times as many students but only $8,000 more in salary.

Val Mignona, the president of the Altoona Area School District’s board, said the district looked at the compensation of superintendents in the same geographical area when setting Hatch’s salary, rather than comparing the position to other districts of a similar size.

No one on the board at Bucks County Montessori responded to PennLive’s questions about Long’s salary. Instead, Tony Stango, the CEO and operations manager for the school, responded to an email directed at the board by saying Long deserved a higher salary, in part because his school is smaller. Long’s role is more demanding, Stango said, because he doesn’t have as many administrators to help him.

“Unlike larger districts where leadership is distributed across multiple administrators and department heads, ours needs to be critically involved in all core functions: academic vision, discipline, curriculum, operations, and community relations,” Stango said.

Stango also said Long’s compensation was determined, in part, because of the school’s successes on school ranking reports and because it is difficult to hire leaders with an expertise in Montessori.

“To reduce this discussion to a per-student ratio ignores the complexity of school leadership and the proven impact of their work,” Stango said.

Differences in superintendent pay is one piece of a larger story, according to Mackenzie Christ, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association: charter schools pay more for all kinds of administration. Charter schools spend around 10% of their total budget on CEO and principal services, compared to district schools that spend just over 4% of their budgets on superintendents and principals.

Sherri Smith, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators, thinks one of the big reasons for these differences is that charter school board members are elected by their own boards, while district school board members are elected directly by taxpayers.

Local school boards have to make decisions about whether to raise taxes and they have to answer to angry taxpayers who show up at their meetings, Smith said, but charter school boards don’t have to make controversial decisions about raising taxes. “So they don’t really have pushback or that local oversight,” she said.

But Smith is sympathetic to some of the reasons charter schools give for paying high salaries, including the additional challenges district leaders can face in small, rural school districts. And she said, higher salaries for superintendents might have the potential to reduce turnover, especially in rural areas that have a harder time attracting talent.

“I think they should be paying their superintendents more, knowing what those superintendents deal with and do every single day. Absolutely,” she said. “When you get a superintendent that’s serving less than three years in the district, you can’t show or lead school improvement.”

Charter schools were created to find innovative solutions to educational challenges and executive pay is one area that they’ve succeeded, according to Maurice Flurie, the board president for the non-profit Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools. The higher pay at charter schools makes it easier for those schools to keep their leadership teams around for longer, Flurie said.

“Let’s face it, it’s a competitive environment,” Flurie said. “Sometimes it’s a very, very small candidate pool. And so a lot of the charter schools know that their CEOs could be hot commodities on the superintendent’s market. And so sometimes they’re compensated strictly to help keep them out of that marketplace. ”

Data from the Department of Education bear this out, although the differences are relatively minor: The median charter CEO has been with the same charter school for 10 years, while the median superintendent has been with their district for nine years. And while one in every three district superintendents is still in their first five years with their district — only one in four charter school CEOs are.

Charter schools sometimes compare the pay of their leaders to other non-profits in the area with similar numbers of staff and budget sizes, Flurie said, which can help widen the talent pool, including people who might not otherwise consider an education job. “We’re not bringing enough people outside of education into the superintendency that look at it more like a business and how to be more economical in spending,” he said.

Flurie said because charter school boards are not elected, they tend to have more stability and function more like a private company. And that stability, he said, gives them more incentive to invest in their executives. That was true, Fleury said, when he was the CEO of Commonwealth Charter Academy.

“I knew my board was going to be stable and that that was going to help our decision making,” he said. “Whereas if you’re a school superintendent, that five year plan, in three years you might have a completely different nine people that may change that plan.”

The increased executive pay at charter schools hasn’t led to systematically better education outcomes on measures like standardized tests, Smith said. But higher pay is coming at a cost to local districts because it “creates for a lot of push and pull for executive jobs across the commonwealth,” she said “which is very problematic for a big portion of [local public] schools.”