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Retirement in Education: The Economic and Social Functions of the Teachers' Pension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

William Graebner
William Graebner*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Fredonia
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Extract

In April 1891, the Journal of Education published a symposium on teachers' pensions, the first national attention the issue had received. The honor of opening the symposium went to U.S. Commissioner of Education W.T. Harris, who presented the case against pensions — even then, a minority view, shared by only six of the fifteen symposium participants. A general system of teachers' pensions, Harris argued, would bring undesirable persons into the profession, prevent the formation of habits of thrift, and reduce salaries, which were, Harris emphasized, rising. “Consequently,” the Commissioner said, “the teacher with an equal amount of thrift or personal economy may provide for his old age just as well as the mass of the community.” This last remark must have seemed as hollow to public school teachers as it did to a number of symposium participants, for at no time in the half century after 1870 did teachers receive more than minimal compensation. Chicago teachers argued before the Board of Education in 1895 that their salaries were much the same as they had been in 1877. A deflationary economy eased the teachers' plight somewhat through most of the late nineteenth century, but after 1900 this protection was not available. In 1905, E.G. Kimball, President of the District of Columbia Teachers' Annuity and Aid Association, appealed to Andrew Carnegie for subsidy. The situation he depicted might have been of any of hundreds of school districts across the nation—low salaries, a rising cost of living, a heavily female population bound to the city by family ties and thus unable to pursue higher salaries elsewhere. Several years later, the National Education Association (NEA) presented data revealing that in forty-four of forty-eight cities, salaries of elementary teachers were below those of laborers. Averaging only forty years of age in 1913, urban teachers had become bitter over their inability to save. Active or retired, Boston's women teachers were predominantly unmarried, burdened by the need to spend a portion of their earnings in the care of dependents, and having very limited savings or none at all.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , Winter 1978 , pp. 397 - 417
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 by New York University 

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References

Notes

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