Retardation Statistics from the Smaller Minnesota Towns
- Author:
Fkeeman E. Ltjeton,
Superintendent of City Schools, Anoka, Minnesota.
The statistics here brought together were gathered, for the most part, in two separate investigations. One, relating principally to retardation in all its aspects, was conducted under the auspices of the Minnesota Psychological Conference. The other, concerning itself mainly with the first year of retardation or with “repeaters,” was made at the request of the Associated School Boards of Minnesota.
The Schools Studied.
The schools contributing the data on retardation proper are fifty-five of the smaller systems of the state. Each maintains a high school, known as a “state high school” owing to the fact that they are carefully inspected and listed with the State High School Board for a large yearly grant, direct from the treasury. They are, therefore, schools that are kept at the highest state of efficiency possible under present conditions.
Only Grade Pupils Considered.
Only the pupils in the grades below the high school are here considered, for several reasons. First, the high school students are invariably promoted by subjects, hence accurate statistics as to retardation among them, in the usual sense of the term, cannot be obtained. Then again, with the eighth grade once passed, and often earlier, the most retarded pupils, being safely beyond the compelling influences of the truancy law, or of social opinion, quickly drop out of school, and the problem of retardation becomes so confused with the problem of elimination, as to make the value of the figures doubtful.
A State-Wide Study.
The schools studied were well distributed over the state so as to embrace every variety of conditions affecting size, location, and environment, and so as to make the study fairly representa(13) tive of the entire state. The results are believed to be an index to the conditions prevailing throughout Minnesota.
The Ayres Standard of Retardation.
In Mr. Ayres’ investigations, published by the Russell Sage Foundation, children in the first grade are considered normal if they are under eight years of age. In the second grade, ages under nine are normal, and so on through the grades. The reasons for thus allowing an extra year are not given. The text merely says that these are the ages allotted to those grades by ‘’common consent.” But certainly it is not in accord with the actual practice in Minnesota, and I doubt if it is generally true elsewhere. Its effect is to conceal one year’s retardation for each and every child during his progress through the grades, provided he entered at six years of age, and last year only 441 children in the schools under consideration were over six years of age at the time of entrance, while almost as many entered earlier, as they are usually admitted if they reach their sixth birthday before the middle of the year.
A child entering the first grade at six should be in the second grade at seven, the third grade at eight, and so on. JSTow suppose he fails to be promoted at the end of the first year and remains in that grade two years, repeating the work and retarded, yet his age when he enters the second grade would be only eight, and that by the Ayres method would be considered normal. It is clear then that by the method Mr. Ayres used it is possible for every child in an entire school system to be retarded one year and yet for the system appear absolutely free from retarded pupils. The Minnesota Standard of Retardation.
In every school system covered by this investigation the children are admitted at six years of age or younger. We have reckoned the entering age as six. Further, in every one of those schools, promotions are made only once a year, in June. Each grade, by definition, means a year’s work. Therefore the child who enters the first grade at six, should enter the second at seven, the third at eight, and so on, grade by grade. And again, the state expects to provide the child with only eight years of elementary schooling, which is to begin in his sixth year. From the administrative point of view, then, the child, who waits till he is seven years of age before entering school, is already behind the schedule. He will get out later, begin work later, and lose one year of his economically productive life, which is what the state has primarily in view in the education of its children. The Tabulated Statistics.
The complete results of the investigation are given in table A. This gives the grade-age status of 17,279 grade children in the fifty-five cities and villages of Minnesota included in this study. Attention should be called to the fact that the data was collected in the fall and deals only with children actually enrolled. This makes the showing favorable to the schools, for some children who failed to win promotion in the spring, no doubt dropped out during the summer.
Retardation is computed upon the Minnesota basis of entering at six, and spending a single year in a grade and no more.
TABLE A.
Shows Grade by Grade, and by Sex, the Amount of Retardation. Number Per Cent Total 2691 2065 2164 226S 2129 1044 1862 2007 Boys 1436 1096 1134 1134 1109 977 929 Girls 1255 969 1030 1134 1020 , 967 933 Retarded I Normal Boys 38.7 54.0 61.1 65.9 68.8 73.7 70.4 Girls Boys 33.6 41.1 57.7 56. 1 63.2 67.7 65.9 886 ! 1121 74.0 67.0 63.8 37.8 33.1 28.3 25.2 21.0 24.3 30.5 Girls 59.0 47.2 40.9 35.5 29.8 25.0 27.1 26.4 Advanced Boys 7.5 8.2 5.8 5.9 6.0 5.3 5.3 5.8 Girls 7.4 11.7 7.4 8.4 7.0 8.0 7.0 6.6 Total, 17,279 Average, 58. 9 34.2
In studying this table you will note four things, all probably contrary to popular belief. First, the boys equal or exceed the girls in number in every grade up to the seventh where they fall only four behind. It is in, or at the close of the seventh grade, then, that the boy meets his decisive defeat. Secondly, the workings of the process of elimination can be clearly and best seen in the last three grades. Elimination is not stronger at the close of the eighth than during the three preceding grades. The normally placed child would enter the sixth grade at eleven; the retarded ones would be older, but discouragement, economic pressure in the homes, and the inapplicability or the non-enforcement of the truancy law permits them to drop out. Thirdly, the retardation begins heavily in the first grade and steadily increases grade by grade through the eighth, with the exception of the downward drop of the curve in the seventh grade, due probably to rapid elimination at that critical point. Fourthly, the retardation of the boys is greater than that of the girls right from the start and remains so, grade by grade, varying from an excess of 5.1 per cent, in the first grade to 7 per cent, in the eighth grade. The average percentage of retardation officially reported to exist in these schols, under their own standard of requirements, is 58.7 per cent. As I have said elsewhere, when the course of study makes requirements such that only 41.3 per cent of the pupils can or do meet them, we have as the result a curious state of affairs, where to be abnormal is the usual or normal condition.
Reduced to the Ay res Standard.
The Ayres method of computing retardation would be incorrect according to the conditions governing the school systems under consideration. But for the sake of comparison, the data on hand have been computed by that method also and the results are shown in table B. There, the average percentage of retardation is 30.9. That is bad enough. This, however, is only 52.0 per cent of the amount actually known to exist in these schools. The balance is concealed by the allowance of an extra year in the grades, for possible late entrants, when these are too few to warrant any such allowance.
Mr. Ayres’ figures, published elsewhere, give for thirty-one important cities an average of 33.7 per cent retarded children, varying from 7.5 in Medford, Massachusetts, to 75.8 per cent among the colored children of Memphis, Tennessee.
TABLE B.
(This is Table A Reduced to the Ayres Basis for Comparison.) Number rotal Boys Girls 2691 2065 2164 2268 2129 1944 1862 2007 1436 1096 1134 1134 1109 977 929 886 1255 969 1030 1134 1020 967 933 1121 Per Cent Retarded Boys 14.6 22.5 30.6 38.2 44.2 47.4 44.2 45.3 Girls 9.1 17.3 20.8 27.7 34.8 38.5 36.3 39.5 Normal Boys 77.9 69.3 63.6 55.9 49.8 47.3 50.5 49.2 Girls 83.5 71.0 71.8 63.9 58.2 53.5 56.4 53.9 Advanced Boys 7.5 8.2 5.8 5.9 6.0 5.3 5.3 5.8 Girls 7.4 11.7 7.4 8.4 7.0 8.0 7.0 6.6
Total, 17,279 Average, 30.9 62.0 7.1 STATISTICS FROM MINNESOTA TOWNS. 17 The following statistics, presented for purposes of comparison, deal in every case only with, children in the grades, as before. Minnesota. Ayres.
The fifty-five cities above, enrolling…. 17,279 58.7 30.9
Forty-one graded schools in Minnesota. . 5,340 64.6 33.9
Four special cities in Minnesota 3,753 66.5 33.7
4. Fargo, North Dakota 2,087 55.6 24.9 The schools in item two above are small ones with from four to six teachers as a rule; but they are inspected for state aid, and are the schools from which the high schools of the state are recruited.
The “special” cities whose figures are not included with the fifty-five towns in item one, are among the best in the state and are commonly regarded as having fine schools. Repeaters. Possibly one of the best ways to get at the real loss in a school system is to compute it from the number of repeaters. By this method no confusion arises over the question of their age at entrance nor the proper age limits for each grade. Elimination works confusion here, as it did before. At the same time we must bear in mind that the “repeaters” are only one year’s contribution to the full army of retarded children. Financially, it i?? only during the time when he repeats that the retarded child costs the state anything extra?is a loss. The state expects to provide him with eight years’ schooling, but no more. In order to ascertain at first hand the amount of repeating in the schools of Minnesota, I recently sent out a printed questionnaire to all the superintendents in the state. Ninety-six, slightly less than half, replied promptly and with well-arranged data.
The figures given include a total of 40,710 grade children. The number found to be repeating the work of their grade, and the per cent of the total number of repeaters to be found in each grade is as follows:
Grades I II III IV V VI VII VIII Number 664 309 296 374 396 330 318 443 Per cent 18.1 9.8 9.4 11.9 12.6 10.5 10.1 14.1 Also 168 others are repeating the work for the second time. This is 7.4 per cent of the total grade enrolment in the 96 systems, but this does not adequately measure the ground lost last year in these schools, for two reasons. First, the data being gathered in the fall from the actual enrolment in the schools, and not being compiled from office records, does not account for the number of pupils who dropped out during the summer, and the number thus eliminated must be considerable. Secondly, (and this is an important factor never alluded to so far as I have discovered in the literature on the subject), there is a practice, almost uniform among superintendents, of promoting a child arbitrarily at the end of two years in a given grade, whether his work merits it or not. This practice conceals a very considerable amount of the worst sort of repeating, that is, second-time repeating, and likewise, by forcing the child on through the grades whether he merits promotion or not, reduces the apparent amount of retardation. Akin to this practice is another which has the same effect. It is the custom of promoting some children “on trial,” even if they do not quite meet the requirements of the class, where for one reason or another they are permitted to remain. And need it be added that when once a child has been allowed to go on with the class he is rarely reduced to the grade below, no matter how poor his work? The causes which operated to place him above the grade he merited operate to keep him there.
The data show 1612 children promoted on trial this year; there are no figures to show the numbers arbitrarily promoted at the end of the second year in a grade. It is certain that these two practices reduce the actual number of repeating and retarded children considerably.
Compared with Ay res’ Results.
While my figures show a considerably larger percentage of retarded children, those of Mr. Ayres, curiously enough, show in the fifty-five leading cities given in his tabulated report, that the average percentage of repeaters is 15.4, more than double mine. I think that is due, as I have pointed out, to the fact that his method conceals part of the retardation, whereas it would not so conceal the repeaters. He is dealing with large cities. In them the number of repeaters is great. But where the number of repeaters is great the amount of retardation must be great, too. Having carefully studied the laggards in our Minnesota schools from two standpoints, it is interesting to note how strikingly the results agree. We found the percentage of retardation to be 58.9 and that of repeaters to be 7.4. Now, bearing in mind that the number of repeaters is merely one year’s quota of retarded ones, and multiplying the 7A by eight, the number of years in the grade course, we have 59.2 as the calculated number of laggards. The ascertained number is only .3 of one per cent less than this. The Money Cost of Repeaters.
School administrators and the public generally would consider the gist of the whole problem to be the fearful expense. Money spent in doing the same work twice over is money wasted. Minnesota expends annually upon her schools about $15,000,000 and if 7.4 per cent of this is spent on repeaters then the loss is $1,110,000. It is estimated that the nation similarly losses from 57 to 80 millions annually from the same cause.
We justly boast in Minnesota of our great school fund of $27,000,000, but here is a sum, two or three times as great, wasted annually in the United States because of some maladjustments along a single line in the management of the public schools. The True Loss.
The true loss, however, is the spiritual one which cannot be submitted to statistical investigation. The retarded pupils personally lose that fine spirit of initiative, of progress, of growth, of self-reliance, and of eagerness to achieve, which constitutes the chief glory of youth, and which sends him from school into life an effective member of society. By allowing him to become retarded, the school system trades that birthright of the American boy for the pottage of idleness, failure, and self-distrust.
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