Excerpt from The Normal School Crisis

Four years ago I tried to show this Council that the humiliation of the Illinois Normal School had begun twenty years before. It was no accident that in the eighties and in the nineties the professors in our normal schools were the educational leaders of Illinois. Two thousand dollars was not a high salary but it was more than was paid on the average to superintendents of our 42 largest cities, excepting Chicago, and as much as was paid to heads of departments at the University of Illinois.

As one looks back today he wonders whether upon this salary question we normal school people were asleep during the twenty years preceding the outbreak of the European War. Slowly prices rose, until by 1913 they were 60 per cent higher than. In 1896 and 40 per cent higher than the average level of the nineties. With the prices of commodities rose the salaries of public school teachers and of pro fessors at the State University. Between 1897 and 1916 in three classes of our largest cities - excepting Chicago - salary increases averaged, for superintendents 85, 45, and 74 per cent respectively, and for high school principals, 82, 66, and 136 per cent, while at the Uni versity of Illinois for heads of departments they more than doubled. During the-same period for a week of service the money wage of the normal school professor increased 16 per cent. Perhaps nobody in tended this humiliation of the normal teacher. A rise of three per cent a year in prices and in superintendents' salaries may have escaped notice. But while the normal school professor's salary in 1897 had exceeded the high school teacher's salary by 31 per cent and the superintendent's salary by 8 per cent, by 1916 the superintendent's pay was 30 per cent and the high school principal's pay 14 per cent above that of the professor.

If the twenty years preceding the outbreak of the War form the first period of normal school degradation in Illinois, the briefer time since the outbreak completes a second period.

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