Expensive Product, Cheap

Seattle school kids, decked out in Gay Nineties costume, paraded through downtown streets, waving posters which said that their schools were as outmoded as the clothes they wore. At their teachers' prompting, they went home and bothered their parents likewise. Last week harassed fathers & mothers voted (90,000 to 15,000) a $10 million bond issue to build new schools and modernize old ones.

What the Seattle youngsters (and their teachers) accomplished, many another city's educators wanted. Would taxpayers elsewhere take a hint?

New York City schools lost 1,119 teachers in 1945, were losing more & more. G.I.s who were once teachers were not going back: there were better-paying jobs elsewhere.

In the colleges, things were just as bad. Princeton raised faculty salaries (to a $2,500 minimum for instructors), passed the higher cost of living on to students, whose tuition was boosted from $450 to $500. Colgate and Vassar had already done the same.

Warned Dr. Constance M. McCullough of Western Reserve: "The teacher shortage is not the malady; it is a symptom. . . . The American people are trying to buy an expensive product cheap. . . ." The National Education Association estimated that it would cost the U.S. $420 million a year to raise all teachers' salaries to what it regards as a desirable minimum: $2,000.

In Mankato, Minn., the Board of Education offered every new schoolmarm a pair of nylons.

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