Consider these elements separately.
1. A teacher is expected from the first month of work to be self-supporting and to live in a manner befitting the dignity of the profession. Not simply a bare subsistence, but refined recreation and continued culture as well as freedom from economic anxiety about the future are essential to the discharge of the teacher’s high duties. On what sum can a young person in New York secure these advantages? That sum must fix the minimum paid even though stark necessity would force sufficient unfortunates to accept less, temporarily, if less were offered. For some years the New York minimum has been $600 for the first year, an amount, as I shall show later, admitted to be inadequate at present.
2. Normally, by added experience, a teacher for several years becomes more valuable year by year. Therefore an annual increase of salary is granted automatically, falling like the rain upon the just and the unjust, except that the eighth and thirteenth increments are given only upon satisfactory reports of the teacher’s work. In practice the increment is hardly ever withheld. But no attempt is made to determine at what age a teacher reaches maximum efficiency. Maximum salary for grade work in the elementary schools is reached by women in 16 years and by men in 12 years, not because the men reach their maximum efficiency more rapidly than women, but because a more rapid advance to their highest salary has been judged necessary to hold them in the profession. Probably most men and women are as efficient after five or six years’ service as they ever become for grade work.
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.