Education: Pay on the Way

Spurred by Buffalo’s strike, Governor Thomas E. Dewey’s administration hurried out a plan that will give $52,000,000 during the next six years to the state’s teachers.

The Republican legislature had already rushed through an emergency bill to pay New York State’s 72,000 teachers a minimum salary of $2,000 a year (TIME, Jan. 20). For many an upstate rural teacher it was a sizable boost, but most city teachers were already making more.

Under Dewey’s new plan, teachers in small communities would get a permanent minimum of $2,000, a maximum of $4,100. Cities over 100,000 population (such as Buffalo) would have $2.200 minimums, $4,510 maximums. Buffalo’s striking Federation said this would mean that only 236 teachers would get more than a $35 raise next year. New York City’s teachers were guaranteed $2,500 minimums (the active minimum already in effect, including a $300 emergency raise good until April, 1948, is $2,508).

Dewey’s plan did away with the age-old difference in elementary and high-school pay scales on the grounds that “it is just as important to get good teaching for children in the grade schools as for children in the high schools.” The new plan also struck at an evil that had corroded the New York City, Buffalo and Rochester school systems for years: it nearly doubled the pay of substitute teachers, thereby all but wiped out the sweatshop system of “permanent substitutes.” (There are 5,500 New York State substitutes, some of whom have been teaching regularly for ten years.) And it attacked the seniority system (which is vociferously backed by teacher groups) by putting all promotions after six years of teaching on a merit basis. Said Dewey’s committee: “For too long, promotion from beginning pay to maximum pay has been automatic. . . .”

The New York State plan was the week’s most discussed plan, but it was not the only one, or the most generous:

¶ In New Jersey, Governor Alfred Driscoll backed a new statewide minimum the same as New York’s. Newark voted its teachers $600 raises, set up a scale whose minimums and maximums ($2,600 to $5,400) are higher than New York City’s.

¶ In Delaware, after more than half of the state’s 1,700 teachers had gone on a one-day strike, the legislature voted raises of $200 to $800.

¶ In Norwalk, Conn., scene of the first of the recent U.S. teachers’ strikes (TIME, Sept. 16), teachers got good news. A committee of three outside educators handed in a 33-page report recommending a drastically increased pay scale, beginning at $2,400. The “Norwalk Plan” also urged a new top classification of “artist” or master teacher. Pay for an artist teacher: $6,000 “and more.”