In most cases no educational or experience qualifications are required by any higher authority for inspectors. As a result local politics, village gossip, and jealousies have free play.
Usually there is no provision for office expenses, assistant, or clerical force. The superintendent's salary is low, often lower than a teacher's salary. The superintendent of Ziebach County, South Dakota, received only $44.76 monthly, while the average teachers salary was $55.04 per month. Another county superintendent told the writer that all his salary went for gasoline and repairs for the automobile with which he made his inspection tours. To the question why he served the county without compensation he answered, "Because I love the 'game' and have my own private income."
Another defect is the fact that the superintendents have to cover too large a field. A county contains from one hundred to three hundred teachers, and nearly as many schools. The county superintendent is able properly to inspect all the schools under jurisdiction only once or twice a year, which is not sufficient for the direction of the school work. Quite a number of the county superintendents complained about the lack of authority over teachers, especially in their selection and appointment. Under such a condition, if a teacher carries out the superintendent's wish or advice, she does so merely from courtesy.
On the whole, most of the local school inspectors and superintendents interviewed by the writer impressed him favorably so far as personal character went. They seemed to like their work and were doing what they could under the circumstances.
PROPOSED MEASURES
There is no other public institution in the country so varied in its organization, its strength, its methods and ways as the elementary public-school system. It ranges from a shanty-like to a palace-like building, from a teacher almost illiterate herself to a teacher with an education and training which fit her for a college chair, from a few hundred dollars of yearly appropriation to tens of thousands of dollars for upkeep of a single school, from one teacher to a staff of teachers in one school, from an almost voluntary attendance to a rigid compulsory attendance. All these wide variations, in themselves picturesque, are a weakness of the system.
When the writer speaks of the weakness of the elementary public schools he uses this term in a relative sense, keeping always in mind that there is no other tool in the hands of the government so powerful in stamping out and keeping out illiteracy and hyphenism as the public school.
To make it meet these tasks a uniform public-school system based on standard requirements should be established throughout the country by the Federal, state, and local governments closely co-operating with one another for this purpose.
The Federal Bureau of Education should certainly be developed and elevated to the status of a department similar to that in a number of the states, and in almost all foreign countries.
The reorganization and the support of an efficient public-school system would require heavy public expenditure, a substantial part of which should be contributed by the Federal government to the states as an inducement to the latter to meet the minimum standard requirements in regard to the public-school system and to accept Federal inspection of the schools for the purpose of ascertaining that the states and the counties were keeping to the minimum requirements, which might be as follows: