Teachers’ salaries differ in different cities and affect the problems of cost; the number of hours that teachers teach is another cause of variation.
Books and Supplies
Certain cities supply the pupils with books and materials, while other cities require the children to bring their supplies from home. In the long run, the cost falls on the community in either case, but it is differently distributed. In the first case, the taxpayers pay for the supplies as they do for school buildings, each taxpayer contributing according to the assessed value of his property. In the second case, parents pay for supplies according to the number of their children and without regard to their property.
In regard to general supplies, there are also differences in policy. Some cities are lavish in furnishing maps and reference books and specimens for nature study, while others are very economical in these respects, sometimes justifying their policy by saying that they put all they can afford to expend into teachers’ salaries. The question is thus raised: How far is it legitimate to spend money in providing material equipment, and how far should it be devoted to the payment of high-salaried teachers? Is it well, for example, to ask a teacher of good training in geography to instruct a class without any wall maps? Is it economical to ask a teacher of history to conduct his classes without books of reference? Or, comparing various kinds of material equipment with each other, one may ask whether it is more essential to spend money on well-lighted, well-ventilated rooms that are barren of apparatus or to put up with old buildings and purchase laboratory equipment.
The Meaning of Financial Organization and Educational Accounting
One reason why it is important that questions like those in the foregoing paragraphs be explicitly formulated is that many citizens think of school finance as wholly distinct from school organization. Very often members of the board of education will disclaim any knowledge of the course of study or of the qualifications of teachers and say that it is their sole duty to supervise expenditures. Consideration of the real problems of school finance soon brings to the surface the fact that financial expenditures are merely means to the end of supplying adequate opportunity for all the children who are required by legislation to attend schools. School finance is one aspect of school organization.
In recent years there has been a movement in the direction of better accounting systems which are designed to reveal the needs of the schools and the ways in which these needs are being met. The financial records of progressive school systems, instead of throwing together expenditures in general accounts, are keeping items of supervision distinct from items of teaching. Costs of supplies of various kinds are kept apart. Thus, janitors’ supplies are kept separate from crayon and other educational supplies. The cost of coal is used as a means of checking the efficiency of janitors.
The Bureau of Education of the United States has prepared bookkeeping forms, and a number of school systems are keeping uniform records of expenditures. This will greatly facilitate comparisons and scientific studies in the future and will help to make school finance more than a mere haphazard distribution of public money.
EXERCISES AND READINGS
What would it cost to supply all the members of a college class with free textbooks? Would it be equally just to supply a college class with notebooks? with writing paper?