Mr. BATES. We have Gordon M. Atherholt, who is vice president of the Northwest Council of Citizens Association.

(No response.)

Mr. BATES. Donald Murray, representative of the teachers' local

union.

STATEMENT OF DONALD MURRAY, LEGISLATIVE REPRESENTATIVE FOR THE UNITED PUBLIC WORKERS, CIO, WASHINGTON, D. C.

Mr. MURRAY. We asked for an opportunity to appear in relation to this testimony, not to complain about the administration of the school system but to put before the committee some of the problems of both pupils and teachers which would be something that should be considered in the budget picture. I do not know whether you want to hear that kind of testimony this afternoon or not.

Mr. BATES. You are not in support of any tax bill or in opposition, but you want to talk, generally speaking, about the administration of the District's business.

Mr. MURRAY. Yes; and the school system particularly.

Mr. BATES. That is all right; I shall be glad to hear you.

Mr. MURRAY. My name is Donald Murray. I am legislative representative for the United Public Workers, CIO. This afternoon I am representing the local union in Washington, covering the city schools. Mr. BATES. You are a resident of the District, Mr. Murray, I take it? Mr. MURRAY. Yes, sir. I have been here since the beginning of 1942. I am a home owner, and I am interested in the District as a citizen as well as spokesman for the organization.

Iam interested in the schools not only in my capacity representing the organization here, but as a parent with a daughter in junior high school and another about to enter school, so I have a personal interest as well.

I do not want to burden the committee record with a lot of detailed testimony about the problems that we face. I hope that the District committees will, before this school term is out, take up the matter itself in connection with some legislation to remedy this situation and that there will then be an opportunity to present full testimony. But I think if we are considering the whole budgetary problem, it is important to know what some of these needs are and what we need to do to meet them.

I would like to give you just a few facts in relation to what I call the problems of children that are now in effect here in the District. We have a situation in which the District has lost about a quarter, during the war years, of its competent teachers who were previously in the school system. We had great difficulty in replacing those positions and in filling new positions.

Of course, the population of the District increased a great deal, so that it has been necessary to fill new positions, if you are going to maintain an adequate school system, an adequate education.

At the present time there are, roughly, 6,600 children in the District who have no teachers. I mean by that that they are assigned to classes which a teacher cannot regularly be assigned to and which, therefore, is divided up, perhaps, occupying itself with some activity which is not in teaching.

There are the 6,000 children who do not have teachers for their classes, and get divided up with other classes or get moved around. They are what they call floating classes. There are thirteen and a half thousand children who are getting a poor education because the teachers that are teaching them are substandard teachers; that is, they are teachers that do not meet the legal requirements to obtain the teaching position in the District of Columbia, but they have had to be appointed to temporary service because no qualified teachers were available who were willing to take the jobs.

In addition to that problem, in addition to those, we have 23 schools in the District which are on a double shift. That means that children get a fourth to a fifth less education. There are periods of 40 minutes instead of 55 minutes, and some periods are cut out altogether during the middle of the winter because it gets dark earlier and you cannot keep the children after school, so there is not time after school to give to the children.

The system is recognized as bad. The District Board of Education recognizes that it is bad, but there is nothing that can be done.

Mr. BATES. Mr. Murray, were you present at the hearing last week when the Superintendent of Schools appeared before this committee? Mr. MURRAY. I am sorry I missed the testimony. I heard about it. afterward.

Mr. BATES. I brought out that this year the latest reports show that the school population was about 2,000 less than it was 10 years ago and the teachers, I think, are around 230 or 240 more than they had at that time, 10 years ago.

Mr. MURRAY. Ten years ago would be 1937.

Mr. BATES. This is a 10-year study we are making. And last week I asked the Superintendent of Schools to send to me a complete schedule of every school in the District, every schoolroom in those schools and the number of pupils in each classroom, and the number of pupils assigned to each teacher. I have made over the week end a very thorough study of all those factors. That is fundamental information.

Mr. MURRAY. Yes, that is correct.

Mr. BATES. And I find there are a number of classrooms that have 40 or 45 pupils in them in the elementary schools, but the greater number by far is less than 25. I find that in the senior high and the junior high classes that they have 35 and 45 in a great many schoolrooms, but the great majority under 35 in those schools. We find a great doubling up, as you say, in the platoon system.

Apparently, from the record I received, a teacher was teaching two platoons, both in the morning and in the afternoon, but in every case teaching a sum total of less than 35 pupils in the classroom a day.

Mr. MURRAY. In the junior-high classes where this happens, as well as in the elementary schools, the teacher teaches a series of classes. Mr. BATES. That is right. We call them home rooms. It is all set up in that fashion, not the study rooms. Everything is broken down into so-called home rooms.

Mr. MURRAY. Of course, the study rooms are the place where the children get their education. The home room is where they meet and have their elections of their class officers and study hall, and so forth. Mr. BATES. They set it up for the purpose of determining the size of the class itself.

Mr. MURRAY. In your double-shift schools, the teachers teach a regular school day. That is, their day is not doubled by that fact. They teach the same number of periods or hours as the teacher in another school does. In places you had not doubled up, you indicated those large classes, of course. In some schools, in some areas there is not the great pressure. In other areas which developed differently, there is great pressure. In one school, which is not the worst, but cer- tainly not the best-it is one of the worst-you have 52 classes. This is the Shaw Junior High, with 40 pupils to a class, 43 classes with 45 pupils to a class, and 21 classes with 50 pupils to a class, 3 with 55, and 2 with 77. If you break it down by the kind of subjects, you have 60 in English classes, with 40 to 45 pupils, and 5 English classes with 45 to 50. It is just too high to get a decent education out of the thing.

I do not know the answer to this question that you asked about the 10-year period. I was not here 10 years ago, but I believe I would not know if I had been. We would be glad to get into that and be prepared later on to talk about that question. As I understand, there are less pupils and more teachers.

Mr. BATES. Two thousand less pupils in the school system today than 10 years ago, and about 250 more school teachers.

Mr. MURRAY. I would want to investigate that. I would have assumed it is a very different picture. Of course, there has been progress in educational methods.

Mr. BATES. The testimony of the Superintendent brought that out. Teachers were about 250 more than 1937, and 2,000 less pupils.

Mr. MURRAY. Did we have this start of overcrowding in 1937? Is it a continuing condition?

Mr. BATES. If we had more pupils in 1937 than now, there must have been more overcrowding. I do not know how many new buildings they have erected or how many discontinued since those days.

Integrating these school children into all these classrooms is quite a major operation, as you understand. Some parents do not like the idea of children crossing another street to get to another school, which would make for more combination. There ought to be a thorough study made into the integration of those pupils. It does not check that there ought to be that overcrowding in the classrooms today when you have 2,000 less pupils than 10 years ago and have 250 more teachers. But apparently those are the facts.

Mr. MURRAY. I am going to check them, and I certainly appreciate your bringing them to our attention. It does not square up with the picture we know from day-to-day association with the classroom teachers and the problems that they have.

There is one other aspect of this which is tied in with the problem of getting teachers. I think there is no disagreement about that problem.

Mr. BATES. It is a Nation-wide situation.

Mr. MURRAY. It is a Nation-wide situation. It is true here in the District, even though the District is not perhaps the worst example in the Nation. It certainly ought in our opinion to be the best. That is the problem of the salaries.

Before the war a teacher in junior high school, who was a new teacher starting out, got $1,600 a year. They now get $2.350, which is actually less money in purchasing power and is worth less to them

than the $1,600 was before the war started. If you figure the BLS on living-cost increases

Mr. BATES. How did that check out? I think the increases have been about 50 percent, have they not? $1,600 to $2,350 is about a 50percent increase. I think the cost of living in Washington is about. a 60-percent increase, is it not?

Mr. MURRAY. Just under that.

Mr. BATES. The new teacher's salary schedule increase over 10 years ago is 75 percent.

Mr. MURRAY. That is right. The proposals we want to discuss when we get down to salary schedules, which are a little bit different than, I think, proposed in the report to the Congress, but are substantially along the same lines, would equalize teachers' salaries with what is paid professional workers in Government, would just about equal so far as the cost-of-living basis is concerned.

I am sure we all want to see the teachers treated better than they were in the thirties. Therefore, if the cost of living adjusts itself, somewhat, we have a chance to make a little progress along the economic ladder. These proposals given to the committee make no progress in terms of what the teacher is able to get in terms of living, further educational opportunities, professional status. They really make no progress for the teacher, they simply keep a level because of the inflationary situation we are in. We have to get rid of inflation before the increases will make progress for us.

Mr. BATES. Is there any general practice on the part of the teachers in the District as in many other communities of working in their spare time at some other type of work?

Mr. MURRAY. There have had to be some. I brought down with me today, one of the teachers of divisions 10 to 14 who has some immediate and direct information on the specific things about the teachers having to work after school, and what the problem in the schools is. I thought it might take a couple of minutes of your time.

Mr. BATES. I shall be glad to hear him when you finish your testi

mony.

Mr. MURRAY. I would just as soon turn it over to him at this point. The point I want to make about salaries, I have made, really, and summarized. That is, before we can solve this problem of adequately staffing our schools with people who are qualified to teach our children, who have the proper educational background we have to do something about teachers' salary.

If you recognize that the pay the teachers are getting in the District now buys less than the $1,600 a year that the beginning high school teacher got before the war, you can readily see that is true.

Mr. BATES. The teachers 10 years ago, say, started with $1,600; they now start at $2,350. What is the new teachers' salary bill that has not come before us yet?

Mr. MURRAY. I do not know, because no bill has actually been written. Mr. Bates. We heard proposals from Mr. Corning that that figure should be $2,500 starting pay.

There ought to be some logic to a figure that you propose. Here in the District of Columbia we have a prevailing wage so far as professional workers are concerned and others pretty much set by the Federal Government. We believe that we ought to be consistent and that a

teacher who must have a college degree to get a job teaching school should be given substantially the same starting salary as a person who is beginning new out of college in a Federal Department or Agency which is $2,600 a year. That is, the P-1 salary in Government should equal the beginning salary for teachers. They are professional people.

Mr. BATES. With no experience along with that college degree? I know a great many who go in as clerk-typists, or some other kind of position where the salary, even though she is a college graduate, is much less than a professional salary.

Mr. MURRAY. But the Government is not paying for the college deit is paying only for what they learned in business school.

gree,

Mr. BATES. That is because the job opportunities are not there in the Government service. Usually they promote, do they not, the man or woman who becomes quite proficient as a clerk or typist into a supervisory position?

Mr. MURRAY. They might promote them into a supervisory position, but it is very difficult to get into a professional position. Once you get into a Government position as a clerk, people are just likely not to regard you as potentially a professional worker. People who have prepared themselves as professional workers will prefer to starve and not to take a clerical assignment.

Mr. BATES. Their position is that the cost of living ought to be somewhat geared in comparison to the introductory salary that people get in the professional grade in Government service. If we apply that whole principle all the way down the line to all the employees of the District who, after all, must live, we find that while the cost of living has increased 60 percent, the average increase in salaries and wages has only been about 41 percent. That is again the testimony of all the other District employees.

Mr. MURRAY. That is correct but the other District employees are getting the same money for the same kind of work with the same training, as the people in the Federal Government because they are assigned salaries in most District departments where they are in classified service, according to the Classification Act schedules. So that the teachers coming under a separate schedule altogether have been treated as a completely separate group and probably they should have their own salary law. But if you make the beginning salaries comparable to the beginning wages in the Government, then you have created a situation about which a professional person might say, "Well, I would like to be a teacher and they pay just as well as being a research worker for the Library of Congress, so I will be a teacher." But if there is a large salary differential and the person has some dependents, they will choose another career, whether it is in the Library of Congress or the National Association of Manufacturers.

Mr. BATES. How many hours a day do the teachers attend schoolelementary school-5 hours a day?

Mr. MURRAY. That is correct, except that the teacher's day does not end when school is over. The teachers have their extracurricular assignments, their own work, the correction of students' papers and most of the teachers I know put in excess of a regular 8-hour working day after hours.

Mr. BATES. How many weeks is a school year?