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.