For some time the Interborough Association of Women Teachers in New York City has conducted a vigorous agitation under the banner “Equal pay for equal work”. This motto has won wide acceptance. Taken literally “Equal pay for equal work” is self-evidently just and reasonable, and persons or governing bodies who oppose it are put on the defensive. But in connection with the schools the phrase is not to be taken literally. It is a factory phrase. For manual workers equal pay for equal work is embodied in the piece-work system, a system generally preferred when the work is of a routine character and when the output of each worker under exactly the same conditions can be measured with precision. A fixed piece price is paid for spinning a yard of cotton, for cutting a dozen coats, for rolling a ton of steel, for making a gross of paper boxes, for stitching a score of shirtwaists. Though in fact men and women rarely perform the same process, even when they work in the same factory, yet the pay per unit is fixed regardless of the age, sex, color, or competence of the worker. There is equal pay for equal work. Superior skill means superior speed and increased output, and pay is proportioned simply to output. But nobody has ever found a satisfactory way to measure the output of a teacher. In England one way has been tried. In the early seventies, when the public schools were made in part an imperial charge, the manufacturers, who were dominant in Parliament, were anxious lest the imperial grants should be so awarded as to encourage laziness among teachers. Somebody hit on the phrase, “Payment by results.” That settled the matter. The phrase caught the fancy of men who ran woolen mills and iron works, men who wanted some rule of thumb by which to measure whether the nation was getting what it paid for. So every year an imperial inspector visited the schools and put to each boy and girl a test in reading, writing, arithmetic, and so on. The exact number of sums worked without mistake, and of misspelt words in the dictation exercises, the precise number of errors each youngster made in reading--all were written down, and the money paid by the government to help that school was proportioned to those returns.