THE ECONOMICS OF “EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK” IN THE SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK CITY
JOHN MARTIN
Board of Education, New York City
For some time the Interborough Association of Women Teachers in New York City has conducted a vigorous agitation under the banner “Equal pay for equal work”. This motto has won wide acceptance. Taken literally “Equal pay for equal work” is self-evidently just and reasonable, and persons or governing bodies who oppose it are put on the defensive. But in connection with the schools the phrase is not to be taken literally.
It is a factory phrase. For manual workers equal pay for equal work is embodied in the piece-work system, a system generally preferred when the work is of a routine character and when the output of each worker under exactly the same conditions can be measured with precision. A fixed piece price is paid for spinning a yard of cotton, for cutting a dozen coats, for rolling a ton of steel, for making a gross of paper boxes, for stitching a score of shirtwaists. Though in fact men and women rarely perform the same process, even when they work in the same factory, yet the pay per unit is fixed regardless of the age, sex, color, or competence of the worker. There is equal pay for equal work. Superior skill means superior speed and increased output, and pay is proportioned simply to output.
But nobody has ever found a satisfactory way to measure the output of a teacher. In England one way has been tried. In the early seventies, when the public schools were made in part an imperial charge, the manufacturers, who were dominant in Parliament, were anxious lest the imperial grants should be so awarded as to encourage laziness among teachers. Somebody hit on the phrase, “Payment by results.” That settled the matter. The phrase caught the fancy of men who ran woolen mills and iron works, men who wanted some rule of thumb by which to measure whether the nation was getting what it paid for. So every year an imperial inspector visited the schools and put to each boy and girl a test in reading, writing, arithmetic, and so on. The exact number of sums worked without mistake, and of misspelt words in the dictation exercises, the precise number of errors each youngster made in reading—all were written down, and the money paid by the government to help that school was proportioned to those returns.
Sometimes a teacher’s salary consisted of the grants so obtained; always the teacher’s professional standing and promotion were determined by these miscalled “results.” In consequence the teacher who was most cruel, who kept children late in school, who sacrificed most relentlessly the finer parts of education, who drove the helpless youngsters at the bayonet’s point, as it were, who wasted no precious moments in merely training the faculties—that teacher got the most money and the most rapid advancement. To their honor be it said that the teachers of England for decades combated the hideous system. At last they convinced legislators that the growth of a child’s mind, the emanations of a teacher’s spirit, cannot be measured by yard stick or quart pot, and the system of “payment by results” was relegated to museums of instruments of torture.
America has been free from any factory method of attempting to gauge the teacher’s work. Nobody has ever seriously proposed to establish piecework in schools and so give equal pay for equal work. The battle cry, like most political catch-words, is inexact and misleading. The Interborough Association means by the “equal pay” principle the merging of the salary schedules where the schedules now distinguish between men and women, so that, whatever other differences of qualification the schedules take into account, they shall ignore differences of sex in the teachers.
To determine the economic and pedagogical results which would flow from the adoption of this principle it is necessary to examine first the system upon which the existing schedules are constructed. Why are thirty-one complicated schedules, which group teachers by a variety of standards, adopted at all? Why is not each teacher judged individually? Because, in New York, where the army of teachers, instructors, directors, principals and superintendents numbers 17,073, individual treatment is physically impossible, and, if it were tried, the schools would be permeated with politics. Perforce the army is divided into a few groups and the members of the same group are paid upon principles which ignore their individual differences of quality.
In constructing salary schedules what elements are taken into account? A number can be detected, of which the chief are: 1. A living wage. 2. Years of experience or age. 3. Length and quality of preparation for the work. 4. Responsibility of the duty performed. 5. Total demand upon the taxpayer which the schedules entail and willingness of the taxpayer to meet the demand. 6. Adjustment over a long period of the supply of teachers to the demand.