niform. The
basis used most frequently is the number enrolled at the end of the
period rather than the total number enrolled for any class, for which
the school has had to provide, and which should most reasonably form
the basis of the percentage of failure. Furthermore, the failures for
pupils who drop out are not usually counted. Yet, in most of the
reports, the situation is not clearly indicated for either of the facts
referred to. Still more difficult is the task of securing a general
statement of failures by subjects, since the percentages are most
frequently reported separately for each class, in each subject, and for
different buildings, but with the number of pupils stated for neither
the failures nor the enrollment. The St. Paul report[8] is an exception
in this regard.

To present the full situation it is indeed necessary to know the
failures for particular teachers, subjects, and buildings, but it is
also frequently necessary to be able to make a comparison of results
for different systems. Consequently, in order to use the varied reports
for the attempted comparison above, the plan was pursued of averaging
the percentages as stated for the different classes, semesters, and
years of a subject, in each school separately, and then selecting the
median school thus determined as the one best representing the city or
the system. This method was employed to modify the reports, and to
secure the percentages as stated above for Denver, Paterson, and
Butte. Any plan of averaging the percentages for the four years of
English, or similarly for any other subject, may actually tend to
misstate the facts, when the percentages or the numbers represented are
not very nearly equal. But, in an incidental way, the difficulty serves
to emphasize the inadequacy and the incomparability in the reporting of
failures as found in the various studies, as well as to warn us of the
hopelessness of reaching any conclusions apart from a knowledge of the
procedure employed in securing the data.

The basis is also provided for some interesting comparisons by
isolating from the general distribution of failures by school subjects
(p. 19) the same facts for the failing graduates. That gives the
following distribution.

THE FAILURES BY SCHOOL SUBJECTS FOR GRADUATES ONLY

Total Math. Eng. Latin Ger. Fr. Hist. Sci. Bus. Span. or
Subj's. Greek

5803 B. 660