“2

and nation to recognize its importance and provide suiteble salaries.
In the N.E.A. Journal for December, 1943, a former teacher states
that he, the best paid teacher in his school system, receiving

#140 a month, discovered thet a former high school pupil of his,

with barely a C average in school, was paid $138.52 a week in
industrial employment.“

While the facts stated here are more or less a matter of common
knowledge, the extent to which they are ignored in the selection,
employment, and payment of teachers is highly disturbing. No one
has been able to show thet in general (there are exceptions)
inferior salaries buy anything better than inferior teaching service,
A city of the first class in this state reports that for the present
year twelve per cent of its elementary and ten per cent of its high
school teachers are emergency appointments. Another city. which
employs more than twenty-five teachers in its junior high school, is
attempting to operate it this year with a staff -of which a majority
are cither emergency appointments or inexpericnced teachers.

In the State School Aid Law, a school is defined as having @ minimum
enrollment of twelve pupils. Yet in one of the more populous and
wealthy counties of Sansas half (38) of its (77) one-teacher schools
enroll eleven or fewer pupils this year -- just as though there were
no shortage of competent tenchers. In another county, fifty-four

of its eighty-one rural schools have teachers certified only by
emergency or normal training (secured from high school) certificates.

fividence from two other counties, which report salaries notably low,
suggests that they are securing for teaching positions in their rural
sehools those who are "teachers" in a rather doubtful or Limited

sense, Of seventy teachers in County A, twenty-six have emergency
certificates, nine have "certificates to be gotten", and eight have
either normal training or normal training renewal certificates, In
County B, having sixty-eight one-teacher schools, sixty of the teachers
heve either normal training or one-year clementary certificates.

Restlessness, transiency, inexperience, even inefficiency may be
expected among the low-salaricd, poorly prepared teachers of this

: 3 : r
group (rural) which is the most numerous in the State. It is the first
year in their present positions for forty-five of the sixty-nine

rural teachers in one county which is rether favorably located.
Fourteen others (of the sixty-nine) were new to their jobs last

year. More than five of every ten of these sixty-nine rural teachers
have had no previous teaching experience in any school.

4 ‘

2Confronted in Crisis. Jesse Stuart, N.E.A. Journal, December 1943.