Pamela Hobart recently noted that grade levels never worked, citing Laggards in our Schools: A Study of Retardation and Elimination In City School Systems, a 1909 book by Leonard P. Ayres for the Russell Sage Foundation. The introduction, by Luther Halsey Gulick, is delightfully of its time:
During the past decade it has been increasingly realized that the education of children who are defective in body, mind, or morals is a matter of great importance to the future of the state. Extensive studies carried on in Great Britain have shown an alarming amount of degeneration. Definite and extensive steps looking toward the care of defective children have been taken in many civilized countries; but the crux of the matter does not lie in the care of these unfortunates. At most they do not constitute more than from one to two per cent of the school population, and it does not appear that any considerable fraction of them can ever be educated so as to become independent members of the community.
The great problem lies in the very much larger class of those who, while they are not defective, do not keep up with their fellows. These, constituting from five to fifty per cent of our school population, can become either failures or successes in life, according to the influences that are brought to bear upon them during their early years.
About this large group we need facts. Are they in their present condition largely because of removable physical disabilities, such as hypertrophied tonsils or adenoids, defective vision or hearing, or malnutrition? Do they drop behind in their school life because of illness? Are they behind because of late entrance into the schools? To what extent is irregularity of attendance a factor in delayed progress? Is compulsory labor after school hours an important factor? When do they drop out of school, and for what reasons? Are there any schools that succeed in educating an appreciably larger per cent of these children than do others? If so, how is it done?
Data with which to answer these questions were not in existence. Application was therefore made to the Russell Sage Foundation for a modest grant with which to make a preliminary survey that might
(1) Put together useful material bearing on these topics;
(2) Develop a mode of attack on the problem;
(3) Analyze a sufficiently large number of cases to demonstrate the utility of the method and give answers of at least a provisional nature to some of the questions.
The grant was allowed in the fall of 1907.
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The most significant of the findings of the investigation are:
(1) That the most important causes of retardation of school children can be removed;
(2) That the old-fashioned virtues of regularity of attendance and faithfulness are major elements of success;
(3) That some cities are already accomplishing excellent results by measures that can be adopted by all;
(4) That relatively few children are so defective as to prevent success in school or in life.
LUTHER H. GULICK
So, our concern is with students who, while not defective, do not keep up with their fellows:
In his report for 1904 Dr. William H. Maxwell, City Superintendent of Schools of New York, called attention to the fact that a large number of pupils (39 per cent in the elementary grades) were shown by his tables to be above the normal age for the grades they were in. In each annual report since then he has regularly published similar tables. Concerning the condition thus disclosed there has been much discussion, and more than one school evil has been unhesitatingly labeled a consequence of “retardation,” as the circumstance of mal-adjustment between the ages and grades of school children came to be termed.
Many causes were assigned in explanation of the conditions revealed. Among these some of the more prominent were the constant influx of non-English speaking children, the enrolling of children in the first grade at a comparatively advanced age, the slow progress of children on account of physical defects or weaknesses, inefficient teaching, unsuitable courses of study, and the shifting of children from school to school by reason of the frequent changes of residence of their families.
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The object of the investigation was to study the problem of the progress of school children through the grades. Its interest was not in the individual, sub-normal, or atypical child but rather in that large class, varying with local conditions from 5 to 75 percent of all the children in our schools, who are older than they should be for the grades they are in.
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In every school there are found some children who are older than they should be for the grades they are in. These children constitute serious problems for the teachers. They are misfits in the classes, require special attention if they are to do satisfactory work and render more difficult the work with the other children. These children are known as over-age or retarded children. They are found in all school systems but are by no means equally common in all systems. In this regard there is an enormous variability among cities. In Medford, Massachusetts, only 7 per cent of the children are retarded according to the standard adopted, while in Memphis, Tennessee, among the colored children 75 per cent are retarded. All of the other cities studied fall between these two extremes. On the average about 33 per cent of all of the pupils in our public schools belong to the class “retarded.” This gives an idea of the magnitude of the problem with which we are dealing. It is not at all a problem concerning a few under-developed or feeble minded children. It is one affecting most intimately perhaps 6,000,000 children in the United States.
Wherever we find that the retarded children constitute a large part of all of the school membership we find that many of the children do not stay in the schools until they complete the elementary course. Children who are backward in their studies and reach the age of fourteen (which is generally the end of the compulsory attendance period) when they are in the fifth or sixth grade instead of in the eighth, rarely stay to graduate. They drop out without finishing. The educational importance of this fact is great. We are apt to think of the common school course as representing the least amount of schooling that should be permitted to anyone, but the fact remains that a large part of all of our children are not completing it. As retardation is a condition affecting all of our schools to some extent, so too elimination, or the falling out of pupils before completing the course, is an evil found everywhere but varying greatly in degree in different localities. In Quincy, Massachusetts, of every hundred children who start in the first grade eighty-two continue to the final grade. In Camden, New Jersey, of every hundred who start only seventeen finish. The other eighty-three fall by the wayside. The general tendency of American cities is to carry all of their children through the fifth grade, to take one-half of them to the eighth grade and one in ten through the high school.
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The contention that the children who make slow progress are in a measure counterbalanced by a substantially equal number who make rapid progress is found to rest on an even slighter basis of fact. Taking the average of the conditions found in our city schools the figures show that for every child who is making more than normally rapid progress there are from eight to ten children making abnormally slow progress. In the lower grades, before the process of elimination enters to remove the badly retarded children, the average progress of the pupils is at the rate of eight grades in ten years. These conditions mean that our courses of study as at present constituted are fitted not to the slow child or to the average child but to the unusually bright one.
If the lower grades of our schools contain many children who are not going ahead at the normal rate, this means that there are large numbers of pupils who are doing the work of the grades they are in for the second or third time. These children are repeaters. The study of the figures from different cities reveals the importance of this class from both the educational and economic view points. The computations show that in the schools of Somerville a little more than 6 per cent of the children are repeaters. From this figure the records of the cities range upwards until we reach Camden, New Jersey, with 30 per cent of the children in the repeating class. The average percentage is a little over 16. This means that in the country as a whole about one-sixth of all of the children are repeating and we are annually spending about $27,000,000 in this wasteful process of repetition in our cities alone.
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In general there is little relation between the percentage of foreigners in the different cities and the amount of retardation found in their schools. Some of our most foreign cities make very good records, while in some of our most American cities school conditions are very bad indeed. In the country as a whole there are more illiterates proportionately among native whites of native parents than among native whites of foreign parents and school attendance is more general among the latter than among the former.
In the New York investigation it was shown that there are decided differences between the different races in the matter of school progress. There the Germans made the best records, followed by Americans, Russians, English, Irish and Italians in that order. Everywhere that investigations have been made it has been conclusively shown that ignorance of the English language is a handicap that is quickly and easily overcome and has little influence on retardation.
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Perhaps no more important set of facts has been brought to light than those relating to the relative standing of the two sexes. We have always known that fewer boys than girls go to the high school but we have not before known that there is 13 per cent more retardation among boys than among girls and 13 per cent more repeaters among boys than among girls, or that the percentage of girls who complete the common school course is 17 per cent greater than the percentage of boys. These facts mean that our schools as at present constituted are far better fitted to the needs of the girls than they are to those of the boys.
There is another thing that has been proved; namely, that these conditions which have been discussed are neither of recent origin nor are they growing worse. Conditions are slowly improving in most places but not in all and not rapidly. They are not improving so rapidly that we have any grounds for feeling that if let alone they will care for themselves.
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If children are to progress regularly through the grades they must be present in the schools. This means that we must have better compulsory attendance laws and better provision for their enforcement. If we are to enforce the attendance laws we must know where the children of school age are. Therefore, we must have better laws for taking the school census and better methods for utilizing the returns. If we are to have all of our children complete the common school course we must have an agreement which is now commonly lacking between the length of the school course and the length of the compulsory attendance period. It is a curious anomaly that we commonly have school courses eight or nine years in length and compel attendance for six years only.
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In our city school systems most of the children enter the first grade at the age of six or seven. Some of them are promoted each year and reach the eighth grade at fourteen or fifteen years of age. Others are not regularly promoted from grade to grade. They fall behind and at the age of fourteen they find themselves, not in the eighth grade, but in the fifth or sixth. This falling back process is termed retardation.
The retarded pupil finds himself in the same class with much younger companions. His age and size are a continual reproach to him. He begins to resent the maternalistic atmosphere of the lower grammar grades. He becomes discouraged through his lack of success and, when he has passed the compulsory attendance age, he leaves school. This dropping out process is termed elimination. It is with these two processes — retardation and elimination — that this volume has to deal.
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We have always known that in our general educational system, the high schools occupy a somewhat privileged position, in that they deal with selected and not with average pupils. Few of the pupils of the common schools continue their work until they reach this institution of secondary instruction. But we have not known, or if we have known, we have failed to realize it, that large numbers of the children who enter the public schools never complete the work of the common schools.
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The significance of the problem is attested by the utterances of educators of national prominence like Commissioner Andrew S. Draper of New York state and students of such distinction as Professor Edward L. Thorndike of Teachers College of Columbia University. In his report published in 1908, Dr. Draper says:
“I have assumed that practically all of the children who do not go to the high schools do finish the elementary schools. That is not the fact. I confess that it startles me to find that certainly not more than two-fifths and undoubtedly not more than a third of the children who enter our elementary schools ever finish them, and that not more than one-half of them go beyond the fifth or sixth grade.”
In the bulletin issued by the Bureau of Education in February, 1908, Prof. Thorndike states the following conclusions:
“At least 25 out of 100 children of the white population of our country who enter school stay only long enough to learn to read simple English, write such words as they commonly use, and perform the four operations for integers without serious errors. A fifth of the children (white) entering city schools stay only to the fifth grade.”
This is a clear example of Seeing Like a State.