One further item is to be added to the calculations above given, in the case of those who go to the city normal college. For these teachers-in-training the city pays an additional two hundred and twenty-eight dollars a year, raising the aggregate expended on such a student to nearly eleven hundred dollars.[15] Such students are typical of a vast number of young people who are attending at public expense state normal schools, state universities, and public technical schools. Indeed, even where students attend endowed institutions and pay tuition, the actual cost of their education is commonly borne in very large measure by the community, which in the last analysis is the source of the endowment.

Total School Expenditures in the United States

Another method of presenting the facts is to deal with totals. The figures which represent the expenditure for public education in the United States are so large that the individual who reads them usually passes them over with little comprehension unless he is given some background for comparison. Perhaps this background can be furnished by recalling the statement quoted in the last chapter, where it was pointed out that a century ago there was practically no conception of the principle of free public schools. Schools were supported in large measure by charity or by tuition. Most communities provided only a very short term and collected a rate bill, or personal tuition, from the pupils to supplement the small fund secured from taxation. During the quarter of a century before 1850 there was a widespread movement in the Northern states which gradually secured in the face of much opposition full public support for schools. Rate bills did not disappear entirely until 1871, the last state to abolish them being New Jersey, but at that date the principle of support through general taxation was completely established.

In 1870, as we are told by the Commissioner of Education, the total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools had reached sixty-three million dollars.[16] Nineteen years later, when the population had increased about 60 per cent, expenditures had more than doubled, reaching one hundred and forty millions. Since that time expenditures have increased by leaps and bounds, far surpassing increases in population, as indicated by the following table:

TABLE I. EXPENDITURES FOR PUBLIC ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS COMPARED FOR A PERIOD OF YEARS, INCLUDING ALSO A COMPARISON OF POPULATION FOR THE SAME PERIODS

1889-18901899-19001909-19101914
Population[16]62,622,25075,602,51591,972,26698,741,324
Expenditures[17]$140,506,715$214,964,618$426,250,434$555,077,146
Expenditure per capita of population$2.24$2.84$4.64$5.62
Expenditure per pupil in average attendance$17.23$20.21$33.23$39.04

These gross figures indicate a growth in schools that has never been paralleled in the history of any country. The doubling of expenditures between 1900 and 1910 is due in part to the rapid evolution of high schools. Elementary schools, however, have shared in the development. Teachers are more highly trained than ever before, new courses have been added to the curriculum, and better hygienic conditions have been provided in school buildings. There can be no mistaking the evidence that American communities are willing to support schools in a program of expansion and improvement.

Cost a Determining Consideration in School Organization

An adequate comprehension of the meaning of the statistics of educational costs will make it impossible for the teacher of Latin to sit apart and say that it is not his duty to think of the community. The teacher of science cannot ask for unlimited equipment for laboratory exercises; the teacher of music or arithmetic cannot say that he is interested merely in spiritual and intellectual affairs and that he has no reason to consider material matters. The impressive fact is that a great public trust has been committed to the hands of teachers. The community has erected schoolhouses and taxed itself to the point where school expenditures have come to be looked upon as a serious burden in many a section of the country. It is a professional obligation resting on the teacher, be he of high or low degree, to think of his relation to this matter of public expenditures. The public is likely to become more and more insistent in the demand that public expenditures be absolutely purged of waste of any kind, either the waste that arises from extravagance or the waste that results from inefficiency.