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 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 degree, it is paying only for what they learned in business school.

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?

Mr. MURRAY. I do not know it in weeks. It is slightly less than 10 months. The teachers are paid in 10 installments. They are paid their annual salary in 10 installments. There are 2 months during the year during which they do not draw pay because they have been paid their full annual salary.

Mr. BATES. That is when the schools are not in session?

Mr. MURRAY. That is correct.

Mr. BATES. Have you anything else, Mr. Murray, before this other witness appears?

Mr. MURRAY. I think that is an outline of it, as I said I can go on and go into detail, but I think that to have the problem before us is sufficient at this time.

In relation to the summer program which is always an argument and they question and discuss the retraining that is constantly required or should be required of teachers is rather peculiar to that profession, so that it seems to me if we expect our teachers to go ahead and get masters degrees and take additional training, we have to consider that that is part of their job.

Mr. BATES. We have a program in the District here where teachers in order to qualify for the second, third, or fourth increment salary increase have to qualify by taking professional courses?

Mr. MURRAY. Yes, there is a system here, a new proposal got to the Board of Education by our union which would formalize that to a great extent, in which the teachers are paid on the basis of the amount of additional courses and additional training that they acquired, both in formal education in school and in additional specialized work in the school system itself.

Mr. BATES. That is a practice in some communities where teachers are required to go to school and take up special courses in order to qualify for the next increment. If they do not qualify, they just do not get any increase in salary.

Mr. MURRAY. The exact way that works the next witness can tell you. I am not a teacher myself. He would know that intimately. Mr. BATES. All right we will hear from him at this time.

STATEMENT OF WOODROW L. DERRICOTE, RANDALL JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, WASHINGTON, D. C.

Mr. DERRICOTE. My name is Woodrow L. Derricote. I am a teacher of social studies at the Randall Junior High School in Washington, D. C., located at First and I Streets SW. I am also a citizen of the District of Columbia.

I truly appreciate this opportunity to appear before the committee. I am glad that I am relieved of the opportunity and the responsibility of speaking on taxes because by no means am I competent in that area, but I have taught in the schools here since 1939, except for 21⁄2 years when I was on educational leave without pay, working toward the acquisition of a Ph. D. degree.

I would like to describe to the committee what it means to be a pupil in one of these double-shift schools-a school which has two sessions, one running from 8 o'clock in the morning until 12:15, and one starting at 12:35 and running to 5 o'clock in the evening.

There are two schools, the Brown Junior High School and the Randall Junior High School, which are now functioning on these schedules. I have taught in both of these schools.

My point of departure could very well be a description of what happens in the elementary schools, for there are 21 elementary schools which work on a part-time basis. However, since I am more acquainted with the junior high school, I would rather discuss that.

My point of departure will not necessarily be what it means to teachers, for schools are established for pupils. So my point of departure will be what it means to the pupils to be a part of this type of organization.

First, may I make the categorical remark that they receive about 6 months of school instead of 9. Some of the ramification of this situation are, first, that he is in school for 4 hours a day instead of 5 or 6. From November to March, the pupil loses 1 hour every day. The classes are rotated. It would be the first hour this week, the second hour next week, third, fourth, fifth, on until we get back to the first hour being lost again.

My colleague has already mentioned the fact that the class periods are of 40 minutes' length instead of the regular 55, which is allotted for the junior high-school organization.

Now, let us move over to the curriculum aspect. In some schools the exploratory work in the seventh grade in the shops is omitted. Large classes with reduced shop equipment and facilities require that the classes be split; for instance, a section may have 42 girls in it. as my section at present has. Twenty of these girls may be assigned to printing and the others must go to another shop.

In some situations it is worse than this. One-half of the class will go to a shop and the other half of the class will be assigned to some room where the activity has no measure of continuity, for it may be one teacher this week and another teacher the next week. Consequently, there is no over-all articulation in the program.

To speak of the extracurricular activity in a school where there is a double session is virtually meaningless, for of all of the values which educators have set up for these extracurricular activities we find that none of these can reach fruition. These activities must either be carried on during the regular school period, at which time the two subjects will be missing, or they will have to be carried on before school, which means they interrupt the activities of the morning session.

This situation is bad enough, but a more serious situation is what happens to the students who are forced out on the street. They do not have the school to come to. They have to loiter around the building. stay at home, play somewhere-most of the time in areas which are not supervised. Naturally, delinquency comes about.

Pupils start playing in the morning and it is a bright, beautiful day, - and instead of going to school at 12:30, since their parents are at work and there is no one to urge them on, consequently they probably do not get to school or become involved with some difficulties with the law.

I have attempted to describe just a few of the situations concerning the pupils. Now let us see what it means to the teachers.

Here we find teachers who must hurry to get out the rooms. They cannot put up the work on the board because another teacher is in

the room. It means that they must buy mimeographing material, that they must hustle about the school building during the day, so they all work under a situation of high nervous tension and a feeling of insecurity.

When we look at this situation and see that the dignity of the profession is not as it should be and is not consonant with other professions, it is no wonder that there is this rapid exodus of teachers from schools into government and business. My colleague has already spoken about salaries. I need not even cite the statistics in that area. However, I think the human interest aspect is important and I would like to say something concerning a question you raised regarding cutside work.

In the building in which I teach there is a shop teacher who has two children attending the University of Illinois. He has one son who is planning to go to Harvard. In order for him to get sufficient money he works the first shift in the morning, goes home and rests, and then he works in a hotel until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning to get enough money to send his children to school. This can be duplicated any number of times.

In my case, I will have to work this summer in order to last through the summer, for I will receive no pay after the last one in June until October 2.

So I am forced out to work.

Let us look at another aspect of the problem; that of the relation between the plight of teachers and actually how it affects the students whom we are trying to guide to continue their education, to work toward being teachers. To cite a personal situation, which I apologize to the committee for doing, I have a master's degree. I also have a Ph. D. from the University of Chicago. It represents 8 years of college work and graduate work. The students at my school are well acquainted with what my academic achievements have been, and they often say to me, "Doc, how long has it taken you to get where you are?" When I tell them 8 years, and they are thoroughly conversant with how poorly teachers are paid, they will speak up in an instant and tell me, "My brother makes more money than you; why should I worry about going to school?" So it makes virtually meaningless our trying to encourage pupils to come to school under these strained conditions of curriculum, deletions of being out of school during the daytime unsupervised. All of these conditions tend to put a tremendous weight on us, and keep us as teachers from being able to do all we would like to.

In conclusion may I say that the vitality and the future of the District of Columbia so far as its citizenry is concerned is intimately woven into the pattern of public education. We must appropriate sufficient funds to satisfy the educational needs of our children, and by all means restore to our profession the dignity which should be its. Mr. BATES. Thank you, Doctor. Do you teach in a junior high school?

Mr. DERRICOTE. I do.

Mr. BATES. How many classrooms are in that junior high-school building that you teach in?

Mr. DERRICOTE. That I cannot say.