You can talk about men mean enough to push biddies in the branch if you like, but they are gentlemen and dead game sports compared to politicians who would cover up the blunders of last year’s fiscal policy by cutting the pay of North Carolina school teachers. The trouble with North Carolina’s finances is perfectly simple, perfectly explicable. The special session of the legislature of 1920 and, later, certain Democratic campaigners, including Governor Morrison, became frightened by the Republican back-flop on revaluation, and unwisely promised no general property tax for state purposes. Having made the promise, Gov. Morrison felt obliged to do all that he could to keep it; and the legislature of 1921 allowed itself to be over-persuaded by him. The legislature levied no tax, hence the state has no money—a consequence that it did not require the mental acumen of a Socrates to foresee.
But is there any disposition to acknowledge the blunder frankly, and set about remedying it as promptly as possible? Far from it. On the other hand, the old guard has been whispering it about that the real trouble with the state’s finances is the inordinately heavy expense of the school system, due to the recent standardization of salaries. The teachers, in short, are to bear the odium of the politicians’ mistakes. The teachers are mostly women, and this masculine, but far from manly, organization is seeking to hid behind their skirts.
No wonder the state superintendent of public instruction is up in arms. It was at cost of enormous labor that he finally got through the legislature his bill to raise salaries to a point where a teacher could live by her profession. To this day it is all that she can do. |the idea that a college graduate, with four years’ teaching experience, is worth no more than $133.33 a month obtains nowhere except in the educational system of North Carolina. Yet the old guard would have the state believe that the princely salaries paid the teachers are responsible for the embarrassment caused by nothing but the imbecility of the old guard itself.
The standardization law is the first step toward raising the teaching profession in this state to the level of dignity and influence occupied by the other learned professions, and on which the educators have the moral right to stand. Consequently, any assault on that law is an assault on every teacher in North Carolina, as well as on the next generation of the state’s citizens. The children cannot protect themselves; but fortunately the teachers are not without means of defense against those who would use their profession for a political football. The teachers are 20,000 strong, and – in spite of the frantic opposition of this same old guard – they have been equipped with votes. They certainly have 20,000 friends outside the profession who will stand with them in such a fight as this; and the swing of 40,000 votes would knock the Democratic majority in North Carolina into a cocked hat.
After all, kicking the teachers around may not be quite as safe an adventure as the old guard seems to imagine. We have an opposition party now that has definitely broken away from the negro, and whose ticket a self respecting white teacher may vote as readily as that of the majority party. There is nothing to chain the teachers to the Democratic party, if that party attempts to use them as a shield against the consequences of its own blunders; and the sooner the teachers manage to impress that fact upon the consciousness of the old guard, the sooner will this scandalous assault upon them be abandoned.
From the Greensboro Daily News as reprinted in the Roanoke-Chowan Times, Rich Square, Northampton County, N.C., Thursday, July 7, 1921. $122.22 a month in 1921 is the equivalent of $1,786 a month in 2021.
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