Sometimes a teacher’s salary consisted of the grants so obtained; always the teacher’s professional standing and promotion were determined by these miscalled “results.” In consequence the teacher who was most cruel, who kept children late in school, who sacrificed most relentlessly the finer parts of education, who drove the helpless youngsters at the bayonet’s point, as it were, who wasted no precious moments in merely training the faculties--that teacher got the most money and the most rapid advancement. To their honor be it said that the teachers of England for decades combated the hideous system. At last they convinced legislators that the growth of a child’s mind, the emanations of a teacher’s spirit, cannot be measured by yard stick or quart pot, and the system of “payment by results” was relegated to museums of instruments of torture. America has been free from any factory method of attempting to gauge the teacher’s work. Nobody has ever seriously proposed to establish piecework in schools and so give equal pay for equal work. The battle cry, like most political catch-words, is inexact and misleading. The Interborough Association means by the “equal pay” principle the merging of the salary schedules where the schedules now distinguish between men and women, so that, whatever other differences of qualification the schedules take into account, they shall ignore differences of sex in the teachers. To determine the economic and pedagogical results which would flow from the adoption of this principle it is necessary to examine first the system upon which the existing schedules are constructed. Why are thirty-one complicated schedules, which group teachers by a variety of standards, adopted at all? Why is not each teacher judged individually? Because, in New York, where the army of teachers, instructors, directors, principals and superintendents numbers 17,073, individual treatment is physically impossible, and, if it were tried, the schools would be permeated with politics. Perforce the army is divided into a few groups and the members of the same group are paid upon principles which ignore their individual differences of quality. In constructing salary schedules what elements are taken into account? A number can be detected, of which the chief are: 1. A living wage. 2. Years of experience or age. 3. Length and quality of preparation for the work. 4. Responsibility of the duty performed. 5. Total demand upon the taxpayer which the schedules entail and willingness of the taxpayer to meet the demand. 6. Adjustment over a long period of the supply of teachers to the demand. Consider these elements separately.