Monroe: Progress and Promotion 



19 



ation, such as the social and economic conditions, the per 

 cent of foreign children, the size of the school systems, etc. 

 This study shows only the condition which exists. It does 

 not reveal the cause. The determination of the cause is a 

 problem for future study. Its solution should be of spe- 

 cial interest to superintendents in cities having semiannual 

 promotion. 



(2) Grade Distributions of Children. The same question 

 (the elimination of children from the public schools) can also 

 be studied by considering the distribution of the children in 

 the several grades which are given in the column marked 

 ''total" in Tables I to VI. It is more important that a child 

 reach a certain grade in school than that he remain in school 

 until a specified age. Our public school course is twelve years 

 in length. If a pupil enters at the age of six, v/hich is the 

 most frequent age, and progresses regularly, he will be 

 eighteen when he completes the course. If he drops out be- 

 fore this age, he has failed to take advantage of the educa- 

 tional opportunities which the community offers him, unless 

 he either started to school before he was six or has made 

 rapid progress. Relatively few cases come under these two 

 heads. On the other hand, a large per cent of children 

 fail and take more than twelve years to finish the course. 

 Hence, the age of a child is not a reliable index of the progress 

 he has made. This is very obvious in Tables I to VI. Chil- 

 dren of every age except the youngest are to be found in 

 several different grades. 



Table VIII gives the number of children in each grade 

 for both groups of school systems reduced to the basis of 

 1,000 in the first grade. The most noticeable thing is the 

 very rapid decrease of the number of children in those 

 systems having semiannual promotions and that the de- 

 crease is much greater than that for those systems having 

 annual promotions. In the systems having semiannual pro- 

 motions the table suggests that out of 1,000 pupils who enter 

 , the first grade, 819 reach the second grade, 803 reach the 

 third grade, 354 reach the last year of the elementary school, 

 and 135 reach the twelfth grade. This table, however, is not 

 subject to such simple interpretation. The number of pupils 

 in the first grade consists of those who started to school in 

 September, 1917, plus those who were not promoted from the 



