278 
FolJcmar—The Duration of School Attendance. 
Superintendent Lane’s results expressed in the same terms 
as those used in this paper, would give us only 10 per cent, 
that drop out at the first grade, 15 per cent, at the second, 
and so forth. There are two errors in his method so funda¬ 
mental and enormous as to make it valueless: the first is that 
he has made no correction for the increase of the higher grades 
through immigration and annexation; the second is that he has 
not taken the real enrollment numbers, as has been done in this 
paper, but has taken the average daily membership of the first 
grade and has traced the progress of this fictitious class through 
the higher grades, also in terms of average daily membership. 
The great uncertainty of his method appears at once upon ap¬ 
plying it to the Milwaukee daily membership, as has been done 
in Tables V to VII (pp. 286-8). The result here must be very 
unwelcome to Mr. Lane, for it shows that his method gives 
almost exactly the same numbers dropping out of each grade 
that this paper does. 
In our surve) 7 of the printed material of the subject, it is 
evident that no sufficient reason has been found to modify the 
conclusions of this paper. Even the most different estimates, 
made by people of various degrees of familiarity with the sub¬ 
ject, all agree that from 40 to 80 per cent, never get into the 
grammar grades, and that from 85 to 95 per cent, never reach the 
high school. Methods and estimates are most at variance below 
the grammar grades, especially in the first and second grades. 
It might be objected that compulsory education laws result in 
a longer attendance at school than is apparent in these statis¬ 
tics. There are two sufficient answers to this claim: first, it is 
not enforced, as the superintendent of the Chicago schools has 
repeatedly said in his reports; * 1 in the second place, if enforced 
it would not necessarily carry the pupil beyond the third grade. 
A simple computation will show that if he be compelled to 
171. Superintendent Lane’s figures are obtained by subtraction from the 
table on page 35 of the Annual Report of the Board of Education, Chi¬ 
cago, for 1897. Superintendent Lane was moved by my tables to this 
attempt to reach different conclusions. His method was pre-figured in a 
personal letter written me May 13,1895. 
1 Report of the Board, 1895, p. 48, for example. 
