What VPS executives get is completely irrelevant to how not-for-profit organisations work, and thus to this post, and to this thread. If you want to discuss that, start a new thread, no one is stopping you.
You responded to a post about the pay a school principal got by stating they are not for profit. I simply responded that being not for profit doesn't mean you are St Francis of Assisi. (In fact I encourage people to go and look at the financials on any charity that they donate to. They may be surprised at how much some of the employees get paid and where the money goes.) Taking your comment at face value to the school principal pay article, I assume that you think that pay is fine since you didn't explain what you meant by your not for profit comment.
But you brought up an interesting point, the exes are accountable to the board. Let's explore that.
Being accountable means there must be a metric that they use to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the school executive. Now I hope you agree that the main function of a school is to educate the students. So I would think one good metric to use would be VCE scores (we are discussing a Victorian school here). Looking at there median score and percentage of scores above 40 (two data points that are used by school in their publicity documents and in news articles) we see that this school performs above average by a couple of points in both categories. Great. So as a competent board would look at schools who are doing just as well or even a bit better and see whether they are getting value for money from the school executive.
Now there are a bunch of private and non-selective public schools who are comparable or do better in this metric. I picked one private school of similar size who is doing better, not by much, but better. Here is what I found (and this the only one I looked at):
Number of remunerated key management personnel: 10
Total amount paid to key management personnel: $1,890,049
I also calculated the cost of the top 10 personnel at a state school (typically 1 principal, 1 business manager, 3 assistant principles and 5 leading teachers): cost is less than $1,500,000 and that is assuming everyone is at top dollar, which never happens.
So this private school is paying $2,000,000 more and getting the same result! Surely the board would be asking serious questions and slashing the pay. Or is the board just incompetent. So I looked at who is on the board. Wow, a university professor, church ministers, and CEO/general managers/leading members of major companies. I assume they are smart people (it's just an assumption). Now guess who else is on the board, two of those 10 who get the extremely generous pay, including the principal. Also, three quarters of the board are appointments that are not elected by the whole school community, some are appointed by the principal!
So we have a board that must be happy with the schools direction that is not representative of the whole school community, has members that may have a conflict of interest, and use some metric about how the school is going that looks like it isn't related to educational outcomes. What metric might that be?
To me this looks like an inefficient school executive, other schools can do the same for less cost. And isn't the private sector the exemplar of efficiency? Maybe we need to have a new body, let's call it the Department of School Efficiency, D.O.S.E. I think that quite a few schools could use a good dose of D.O.S.E. (Sorry, I couldn't resist this bad joke.)
Edit: PS, and by slashing their pay they can save on payroll tax as well!
