Senator FULBRIGHT. Why do you do teaching? Miss CHRISTMAS. Teaching is my profession. I would rather teach. When I go on another job, I just feel I have to help myself, for a specific reason. Senator JOHNSTON. Do you know how many colored teachers you have with A. B. degrees in Mississippi? Miss CHRISTMAS. I do not know how many in Mississippi, but I do know how many in our county. We have four in our county with an A. B. degree. Senator JOHNSTON. Do you know how many white teachers you have with A. B. degrees in your county? Miss CHRISTMAS. Frankly, I do not know. Senator ELLENDER. Are there any other questions? Senator MORSE. I think it would be helpful, Mr. Chairman, for comparative purposes, if someone at a later time supplied us at this place in the record the salaries of the white teachers in this particular county, the teaching loads they carry from the standpoint of pupils and the length of term. Dr. Ivy. I will make an effort to get it. I think it can be obtained very easily. Senator ELLENDER. I am sure we can obtain that. I will make an effort to obtain it from the superintendent of the State of Mississippi, and we will have it placed in the record. If you will get that information, Dr. Ivy, when the record is printed, we will place it in the record following the witness' testi mony. Senator JOHNSTON. Can you also present to the committee the number of colored teachers that have an A. B. degree and the number of white teachers that have an M. A. degree? Dr. Ivy. We can present that data by this time next week. (The information requested by the Senator regarding educational conditions in Copiah County, Miss., is as follows:) Number of white teachers_ Pupil-teacher ratio for Negroes_. White pupil-teacher ratio for average daily attendance_ 91 126 4389: 91 5962:126 2092: 91 3558 : 126 8 6 4,389 5, 962 2,092 Average daily attendance for Negro children_. 3,558 Average annual salary of white teachers_. $889.53 Average annual salary of Negro teachers__ $332.58 Number of white teachers with degrees (5 hold master's degrees). 47 188 of these teachers have had some college training; they are between 1- and 2-year college people. Senator JOHNSTON. Along with educational credits. I would like. to have that in the record for both white and colored. 73384-45-pt. 19 Senator CHAVEZ. I want the following information, too: The assessed valuation of the property in the county. Senator ELLENDER. We will see to it that you get a copy of this part of the record so you can make these inserts. Dr. Ivy. I wonder if you would mind if I said this. That is typical of every county of our State. We have one system of districts that applies to white children and another system of districts that applies to Negro children. White trustees handle the white schools and Negro trustees handle the Negro schools. The length of the school term in Mississippi is set by statute at 8 months, provided the trustees accept that length of time. Senator ELLENDER. Are there any further questions? If not, we thank you very kindly. I understand Mr. Ogg will testify in place of Mr. O'Neal, and we will hear him this afternoon. All right, Mr. Hubbard, you may proceed. STATEMENT OF DR. FRANK W. HUBBARD, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH, NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION Dr. HUBBARD. I am Frank W. Hubbard, research director of the National Education Association. At the hearing yesterday Dr. John K. Norton presented comprehensive and overwhelming evidence on this educational inequality among the States and within the States. His data were for the year 1939-40. That is a year prior to the entrance of the United States into the war. This morning you have heard some testimony from teachers who are in the front lines in teaching in our schools, and they have brought out not only some of the emergency conditions that they are faced with today but also some of the front-line evidence of what Dr. Norton was talking about when he discussed the poor districts in many of these States. My testimony will report on three studies made by the research division of the National Education Association, to try to bring out some of the emergency manpower conditions that are found in the schools. When the schools opened in the school year 1941-42 they expected to open on a fairly normal term. During that time, for the Nation as a whole, they expected that perhaps about 4,000 teachers would be teaching on emergency or substandard certificates. They expected that possibly there would be a turn-over of about 97,000 teachers. In other words, that about 1 teacher in 10 would be new to his position. The year 1941-42 opened in this fairly normal fashion. There had been some shifting about, the rural teachers going from the poorerpaid salaries to the cities. Some of the cities began to lose a few technical people to defense industries, teachers in the field of science and mathematics, but, on the whole, it appeared to be a fairly normal term that was opening up. After the war hit the schools in December of 1941, the first effect was for the schools to try to adjust themselves to the war effort. There were calls for salvaging campaigns, for selective-service registration, for rationing. We had many requests through the National Education Association from Government agencies asking for information as to how the schools could join in these wartime activities. Our estimate, on a sampling of 1941-42, was that the teachers of this Nation gave nearly 40,000,000 hours of time-20,000,000 hours of school time and 20,000,000 hours out of school-to help in rationing and registration, and that sort of thing. Then came the summer of 1942 and there was an exodus of teachers again, and in the fall of 1942 we began to get many letters from superintendents appealing to us, and to the Office of Education, to do something about this manpower crisis that was developing in the schools. They were not able to get teachers to do many of the things that needed to be done-for one thing the preinduction training that the Army was asking for. In January of the school year 1942-43 we decided to explore the situation and get all the facts together that we could. We appealed to State departments of education and to executive secretaries of State education associations to help us get together studies, reports, and estimates so that we could present a national picture of what was happening in the country. I may add that although we had to take estimates in January of the school year 1942-43 on this national picture, our study was followed up a few months later by the United States Office of Education. The Office of Education went directly to the local superintendents of schools where we had been required to go to the States. The Office of Education statement, published 2 or 3 months after ours was completed, showed that the facts we had presented were understatements as to conditions. Now, these are some of the facts that we found in our first study of 1942-43: For the Nation as a whole, 20 percent of the nearly 900,000 teachers were new to their positions. The percents varied widely. In the States in the Middle West and through the South there was a belt of States where the salaries, by and large, in general, are the lowest in the country, where the turn-over of teachers apparently reached 40 to 45 percent. But taking the Nation as a whole, the turn-over was about 20 percent. Now a 20 percent turn-over is just twice what it would have been in any typical normal year; in other words, about 200,000 teachers where in the normal year we would expect a turn-over of about 100,000. About one-fifth of this turn-over was caused by teachers entering the armed forces and related services, and about one-fifth of it was apparently caused by teachers entering war industries and other types of war employment where salaries were high. Forty percent of the teachers of the Nation in that year were receiving less than $1,200 and 7 percent less than $600. Nearly 37,000 positions, out of a little less than 900,000 positions, were filled by persons with emergency or substandard certificates. In 13,000 classrooms, for the Nation as a whole, no teachers could be found. Now, we followed up that study about a year later, in October, for the school year 1943-44, and by this time a number of the States had gone to work and made studies of conditions, so we were getting more exact facts. We asked them not only to give us these exact facts, but to estimate what would probably happen in the year 1943-44, and this is the picture we have for the Nation as a whole: Again, 20 percent of the teachers were new to their positions; in other words, a continuing crisis of a turn-over that was twice what it had been in peacetime years. At least, 50,000 teachers had entered the military services or the war industries, about equal numbers, apparently. Nearly 30 percent of the teachers were still being paid less than $1,200, and 5 percent receiving less than $600. More than 50,000 teachers were employed on emergency and substandard certificates. At least 8,000 classrooms were vacant, and the situation was further complicated by conditions revealed in another study we made at this time, when we discovered what was happening to the teachers' colleges of the country. We found in this year, 1943-44, in the study that we made, that enrollments in the teachers' colleges of the country, the places where the schools for years had been getting about 50,000 to 55,000 new teachers each year, had dropped 50 percent at least, and in some areas, in some States, it had dropped down to about 25 percent of normal peacetime enrollment. Then, we tried again for the third time to get an estimate of what was happening and was likely to happen in this current year of 1944-45. Again we asked State officials to help us put these figures together and to tell us whether or not they were representative of conditions. These figures were collected in October of 1944, but I have checked since with the State departments, and I have not heard from all of them, but those who have replied have said that the figures of October 1944 were an understatement in some cases of conditions in their States. Apparently during this year, 1944-45, we have had again a high `rate of turn-over, nearly 15 percent. Losses to the military and industries this year are not likely to be as high as they have been in the preceding years, but they will possibly be 20,000. However, we still find one-fourth of the teachers in the public elementary and secondary schools receive less than $1,200, and more than 3 percent receive less than $600. In October 1944 there were 10.000 vacant positions. This yearand this is an understatement-80,000 teachers are now teaching on emergency or substandard certificates. You remember in our first study it was 37,000 and then it rose to 50.000, and this year it appears to be 80,000. A check on teachers' colleges showed that they continue to be 50 percent below prewar enrollment. Now, up to this point I have given certain statistics as to over-all studies, but there has been a cumulative effect, too, that has been going on. Note the cumulative effect of finding in every one of these years about 20 percent of the teachers new to their positions, and as I said earlier, in some States a much higher percentage than that. There is a cumulative effect there. The total number of teaching positions since 1941-42 has actually declined by 50,000. The total number of emergency certificates, as I have indicated, has increased from a peacetime period, 2,000 percent. That is from 4,000 certificates issued in any normal year up to 80,000 issued for the current year. It seems that these abnormal losses in manpower and the subsequent replacement of teachers by those with substandard training has come about from two main factors: First, the demands of the military forces and related war services; and, second, the attraction of the high salaries paid in war industries and the rapid advances of salary levels in other nonteaching occupations. In 1941-42, the school year that the United States entered the war, the average annual salary of all elementary and secondary school teachers was $1,507. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Index, this salary had a purchasing power in 1935-39 dollars of $1,294. In 1943-44 the average annual salary was estimated to be $1,625, representing a purchasing power of $1,295. Since the base period 1935-39 the cost-of-living index shows an increase of about 26 percent. Up to the fall of 1944, teachers' salaries on the average, have increased about 15 percent for the Nation as a whole. In this same period the average annual salaries and wages in industrial employment increased about 85 percent. The average annual salaries of Federal employees increased about 37 percent, as reported by the Civil Service Commission. When we note that the purchasing power of teachers' salaries has remained static, if it hasn't actually lost ground, and that nearly onefourth of the teaching positions offer salaries of less than $1,200 a year, it is not difficult to understand why a manpower crisis has developed and continues to exist in the schools. Let me conclude and summarize these statistical studies. Today in our elementary and secondary schools 2 out of 10 teachers are new to their jobs, on the average, throughout the country, and as the teachers testified here this morning, in many areas the ratio is much higher than that. That is twice the normal peacetime rate. One teacher in four is being paid less than $1,200 for the year's work. One teacher in ten is employed on a substandard emergency certificate. These estimates represent a desperate condition facing the school authorities throughout the country. We receive letters continuously from superintendents of schools telling us the trouble they are having in keeping their schools together, even in maintaining the schools, keeping the classes staffed, and yet, with that struggle of maintaining schools, of just keeping things together, many of them remind us of things like these: (1) The preinduction training program that the Army is asking the schools to give the young men who enter the services. These superintendents write in and say, "We are losing our teachers. We cannot keep our school teachers, and yet these Army men come along and expect us to orient these young men for service." Last year I visited a high school in West Virginia, in a small town; I went in to talk to the high-school principal and asked him how he was getting along on the teacher-supply problem. He said, "We have our classes all staffed; there is someone in each classroom." I said, "I wonder if I can see some of the classes?" He said, "All right; let's go into the gymnasium." We went into the gymnasium, and there were about a dozen boys making up decorations for a dance. They were all big, strapping fellows. Most of them are in the Army now. A rather decrepit teacher, |