Part 15

3. A minimum qualification of scholarship, character and experience is set for all teachers, but the minimum for a teacher of the graduating class in the elementary schools is higher than for the lower grades and for the high schools higher than for the graduating class. Therefore the salaries for these upper positions are also higher.

Even if additional academic preparation be not requisite for teaching higher grades, it is desirable to have some “plums” in the schools, that can be given to the pick of the staff for encouragement. Some breaks in the monotony of equal pay for equal age stimulate a body of workers to do their best in competition for the “plums.” Therefore extra emoluments have been given to teachers of the seventh and eight years.

4. Further, the greater the responsibility the higher the pay. Principals are paid more than class teachers, superintendents more than principals.

5. Schedules must be so adjusted as not to make upon the taxpayer a larger gross demand than he will honor. Quite properly the cost of education mounts ever higher; but, in any year, there is a maximum which the taxpayer will allow without rebellion, a highest measure compounded of his ability to pay, the value he sets upon education and the influence of the most enlightened citizens upon him. Presumably if teachers were paid the salaries of ambassadors the highest talent in the country would be attracted to the profession. But ambassadorial emoluments, however desirable they might be both for the nation and for the teachers, are practically unattainable. Taxpayers will not adopt, thus far, Froebel’s injunction: “Let us live for our children.”

6. Over a long period the supply of teachers of requisite quality should equal the demand, and salaries that will attract the supply must be paid. What is the requisite quality? There’s the rub. Examinations tell only part of the truth; college training cannot make “silk purses out of sows’ ears.” Only roughly can the expert superintendent tell whether the quality among ten thousand teachers is as good today as it was ten years ago. Teaching is an art for which the elusive quality of personality--the product of heredity, early surroundings, home influences, native gifts--is as essential as for painting. Of two painters who have had precisely the same masters and the same experience, one may produce masterpieces fit for an imperial gallery and the other daubs fit for a saloon; just so of two teachers of equal academic training, one may radiate noble, the other ignoble influences. Who shall measure the personality of the teacher or compass the growth of the pupil’s intelligence? No radiometer can register the emanations of a teacher’s spirit, no X-rays expose the buddings of a child’s mind.

When the refined daughters of Massachusetts left the cotton mills of Lowell and their places were supplied by peasant immigrants who could not read the “Lowell Offering” which their predecessors published, the quality of the cotton sheeting did not deteriorate, because the character of the operator is not embodied in cotton goods. But, should the same change occur among teachers, the quality of the children at graduation would inevitably run down; for the teacher’s spirit, partly reproduced in the children, is the most precious element of their education. Therefore, no requirement for the schools is more sternly peremptory than that salaries for teachers shall be sufficient to attract a high quality of persons.

At this point we encounter the central claim of the Interborough Association of Women Teachers. For reasons over which the educational authorities have no control men teachers of as high a personal quality as women teachers cannot, over a long period, be secured and held for the same pay. That fact is demonstrated by the present experience of the high schools.

After extended investigation Mr. Frederick H. Paine says:

The board of education appointed during the period September 1909 to February 1910, 100 men, of whom 22 refused appointment, leaving a total of 78 places filled, while 116 vacancies still exist.

The eligible list now contains 61 names, of all classes, who will accept appointment, but, as experience shows, a large proportion will not be available by the time appointment here is offered them. Examinations for license have been held frequently. The last examination, held in November, 1909, added but sixty-four men to the lists, a totally insufficient supply.

Substitutes, an inexperienced teaching force, must be used in boys’ schools, and only women can be appointed to mixed high schools.

An inquiry of the deans of various New England and New York colleges shows that the number of graduates of those institutions who enter the teaching profession has greatly diminished within ten years. At Yale University the decrease is from 12 per cent to less than 2 per cent.

On the average, private schools pay higher salaries to men than the public high schools, although paying lower salaries than do the public high schools to women, and, accordingly, women are more attracted to the public high schools.

It is plain, therefore, that more is involved in the request of the Interborough Association than the removal of artificial, irritating distinctions. The recognition of the element of supply and demand involves the recognition of sex among teachers.

Before examining the effects, economic and pedagogic, which would follow upon the adoption of the suggestions of the organized women teachers it must be reiterated that salary schedules, in point of fact, are not and cannot be constructed in conformity to any abstract principle. They are necessarily a resultant of many forces, the best solution of a vexing problem by the authorities, after due consideration of all the factors. Salaries are settled by the pragmatic method. Whatever schedules work out best in practice, not so much for the teachers as for the children, those schedules are most “just,” most “moral,” most in harmony with the will of the universe.

That the Interborough Association found the problem insoluble upon ideal principles is shown by the latest schedules which they themselves have presented for adoption. These schedules maintain all but one of the elements which appear in the existing schedules; and, even that one, sex, is acknowledged by the provision that teachers of boys’ classes shall receive $180 a year more than teachers of girls’ classes. This acknowledgment strips their contention of that moral quality with which some have endowed it. “A new commandment I give unto you, that you pay men and women of the same age the same salary” has been presented as the twentieth century addition to the decalogue. But if the priestesses who announce this amendment to the moral law themselves assert that it is harder to teach boys than girls, perhaps educational authorities are not altogether wicked when they acknowledge that it is harder to secure boys than girls as teachers, when they grow up.

Neither do the schedules proposed by the Interborough Association, any more than the official schedules, “provide but one salary for one and the same position.” On the contrary, under them any position between the kindergarten and the seventh grade may be filled by teachers with salaries varying from $720 to $1,515. One teacher of the graduating class may receive less than a thousand dollars (the scales are not definite enough to show the exact minimum), another $2,400. Positions in high schools of exactly the same character and difficulty may be filled by assistant teachers at salaries varying from $1,300 to $2,400. The only positions for which the schedules of the Interborough Association “provide but one salary for one and the same position” are the city superintendent of schools, the associate city superintendents, the members of the board of examiners and some directors of special branches.

If the principle of the same salary schedules for men and for women were mandatory, either the women’s salaries might be raised or the men’s salaries reduced. Either process would have palpable consequences, economic and pedagogic. Consider the results of each method separately.

1. To equalize the salaries of all women who were teaching in the same grades as men, with those of the men employed in such grades, in May 1909, would have entailed a cost that year of $7,837,662. But since that date men who were teaching in grades below the sixth have been transferred, so that today, it is estimated, the cost would be below seven million dollars per annum. A large part of that increase would be of the nature of a “bonus” to the women, a bonus, say some legislators, no more justifiable than would be an extra price paid for goods by city officers to women because they were charming.

If the board of education, when appointing new teachers, would save no money by appointing women in preference to men, it is certain that the proportion of men appointed, supposing the rates of pay were high enough to attract men at all, would be much increased. Men would drive out women just as women when they were cheaper have driven out men. Most authorities would agree that such a result would be beneficial to the schools, which sadly need more men; and some approve the dogma of “equal pay” because they desire such a result. The same result could be won at much less cost if the board of education determined to ignore the savings to be made by appointing women and, for the sake of keeping the virile elements in the school, should appoint under its own schedules the dearer men.

2. If the salaries of men were reduced so as to conform to the salaries of women the effects would be considerable.

The cost for teachers would decrease by an amount which nobody has cared to waste labor in estimating, because nobody imagines that either the authorities or the men teachers would permit that experiment and the women teachers would be no more content than anybody else to see it tried. Naturally they do not wish the “equal pay” principle to be applied in a way to put no more money into their pockets. Primarily and properly they seek higher salaries; they would burn no incense to a dogma which promised them no increase.

The pedagogical results of lowering the schedules for men would be disastrous, for, unless the standard of quality in candidates were shamefully lowered, new men would not enter the system and the little band of 2,099 men teachers who now add the male influence to the female influence of their 14,974 women colleagues would fast diminish and soon approach extinction. Then the schools would be entirely feminized, an outcome so bad that even enthusiasts for economy hardly dare openly advocate reducing the men’s pay.

Is the agitation of the women teachers, then, altogether unjustifiable and doomed to be fruitless? Not at all. Already it has had two good effects.

1. It has called public attention to what Governor Hughes styled “glaring inequalities” in the salary schedules. Since the schedules embody the judgment of their builders on a variety of elements, some of them, such as “personality”, quite impalpable, none of them measurable with instruments of precision, the schedules can never satisfy every critic. Always the critic’s judgment of the relative values of academic scholarship, experience, technical skill and so on, may differ from the judgment of the authorities. However, the women teachers have convinced the board of education that the existing differentials between men and women are generally too heavy. For example, of the teachers in elementary schools women start at $600 a year and by yearly increments of $40 go up to $1,240 and men start at $900 a year and by yearly increments of $105 go up to $2,150. That difference is not demanded by the circumstances.

But the differences between salaries of teachers of different ages, which are conspicuous in the schedules framed by the Interborough Association, are equally flagrant and open to attack. In fact any schedules which assume that teachers of different ages who are doing analogous work should receive pay for their years as well as for their effort are vulnerable to a logician’s spear.

One teacher of two years’ experience may possibly do better than another twelve years her senior. The younger may have the divine gift of teaching which comes only by nature; the older be a mere drudge, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. Yet the older, under the schedules of the Interborough Association, would continue to receive a much higher salary than the younger. That may be proper, and is certainly unavoidable, but it mocks at logic and at “equal pay for equal work.”

In a large system like New York’s there is always here and there an old teacher, who though getting the maximum salary, is well known to be doing the feeblest work. The logic of equal pay for equal work would require that the salary of such a veteran be pared down to the bone as is done in manual industries, where, under the piece-work system, no account is taken of the age of the worker, but relentlessly the older man or woman is challenged to keep the pace of colleagues in their prime. When sorrow, sickness or old age weakens the powers nobody proposes to increase the rates to make up for lessening speed, but the worn-out worker is thrown aside.