When Pamela Hobart started discovering how broken age-based grade levels were, she assumed something must have gone wrong:
An astounding 1909 book by Leonard Ayres for the Russell Sage Foundation tells all: Laggards In Our Schools: A Study of Retardation and Elimination In City School Systems.
At this time, teachers were not pressured to “socially promote” students who had not learned that year’s material. Instead, they faced classes with huge age disparities that often resolved by the “overaged” students dropping out (“elimination”) rather than ever catching up to grade level expectations.
For instance, consider New York City in 1906, where ??“of every 100 children entering the first grade, only 24 are found in the eighth grade at the end of eight years. The remainder have either dropped out or are still repeating the lower grades.”
This state of affairs was typical for the time. Across Boston, Philadelphia, Camden, Kansas City, plus New York, “one-fourth to one-half of the pupils are repeating their work, and that the proportion varies little from city to city.” In other words, we’re talking about 30-50% of students being at least one year older than expected for their grade.
Despite the magnitude of the problem, there appears to have been no real mechanism for catching anyone up once they’d fallen behind. As a result, these cities had 7-26% of students lingering 2 or more years behind age level in their work (and as many as 13% of students 3 years behind!)
Grade level reorganization, then, never really delivered efficiency.