Editor’s note: This article appeared in the April 2009 School Business Affairs magazine and is reprinted with permission of the Association of School Business Officials International (ASBO). It was written by Willard S. Elsbree, a professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, and was first published in the October 1937 issue of School Business Affairs. It offers an interesting perspective on today’s teacher salary schedule debates over the proper number of step increments.
Consider that in 1984, the Texas Legislature compressed the salary schedule from 19 step increments down to 10. In 1995, the Legislature expanded the salary schedule to 20 step increments, as it is still structured today. An early provision of HB 3646 that did not pass the 81st session of Texas Legislature called for extending the salary schedule again, this time to 35 step increments. The debate rages on.
Since 1933–1934 there has been a definite trend upward in teachers’ salaries. Following a marked annual rise in the cost of living, most communities have been forced to make adjustments in the wages of civil servants along with the higher compensation commanded by labor. Some boards of education have restored teachers’ salaries to their former levels and have returned to old schedule provisions. Others have abandoned, or are now abandoning, their former scales entirely, and are attempting to substitute salary arrangements more in line with the many changes that have taken place in the character of the teaching personnel and in educational policy.
The foundations upon which the majority of the older schedules were built are decidedly weak. Erected at a time when training requirements of teachers were markedly lower than those now commonly accepted and drafted as they frequently were without any comprehensive study of economic conditions, they are ill adapted to modern needs. In a few instances they are financially unsound and are likely to produce a taxpayers’ rebellion if not a bankrupt community.
Perhaps the issue that is of greatest financial concern is the matter of the number of annual increments to be awarded. In the older schedules it was common practice to provide eight or ten increments. Under this arrangement many teachers arrive at the maximum salary by the time they are thirty-four or thirty-five years of age and expect to remain at this vantage point for another thirty or thirty-five years until forced out by retirement. So long as teaching was a peripatetic profession, communities could count on enough turnover to offset the high cost of maintaining the few whose tenure equalled or exceeded the number of increments allotted.
Unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on how one views it), teachers now are looking at teaching as a life career rather than as a stop-gap until matrimony or a stepping-stone to some other profession, with the result that their average tenure has more than doubled in many sections of the country within the past decade. If this trend continues, the proportion of teachers who will achieve the highest rung of the salary ladder will increase drastically and salary budgets will mount accordingly….
A further weakness in such an arrangement lies in the absence of financial incentive for teachers who survive beyond this brief decade. A thirty-five year old teacher with no further monetary worlds to conquer is apt to lose some of her zest and enthusiasm. The time may come when teachers are paid a “single wage” and when salary increments will no longer be considered necessary for stimulating professional growth. When that day arrives, if ever, American psychology will have been radically modified and other equally potent substitutes will have been created for money….The newer schedules for teachers must unquestionably provide longer spans between the minimum and maximum. It seems probably that eighteen to twenty-five years will be the usual length of time required for a beginning teacher to arrive at the highest point on the salary schedule.
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