APPENDIX
TABLE NUMBER XXVII
Increase in Number of Colored Children in the Schools of the Hill District from January to October 1917, and Number of Children from Southern States Since January, 1917.
Total Average Increase 40%
Table number XXVIIwas compiled from the figures supplied by the principals of the ten schools listed. These schools are located in the Hill District. The figures indicate the increase in the one section only, and do not include all the children who have been brought from the South, but whose parents reside in other sections of the city. The marked increase in the total number of colored children and the great increase in the number of children who have come to this city within the last ten months is significant.
As one would expect the majority of these children are in the lower four grades. This was the case even before the migration but is especially true since the migration. Many of the children from the South either had no schooling at all, or were attending schools with lower standards than ours.
The problem of over-aged pupils is very significant among the Negro children. A principal in one of these schools who has recently made a little study of over-aged pupils in these eleven schools finds that the percentage of Negro children eleven years and over in the lower four grades, is far greater than that of the whites (sixteen percent Negro as compared with four and seven tenths percent whites). This, the same principal remarks, is in spite of the fact that the tendency of the schools is often to promote children upon the basis of their size and age, rather than because of academic attainment. What is more the white children in most of these schools come from homes where the parents are not Americans, but foreigners who often do not speak the English language.
The causes for the backwardness of the Negro children are deep-lying, and are interlinked with their racial traits, social, economic and home environments. Practically all school principals stated that in the first four years the Negro child keeps well up with its white school mates, but that after the fourth grade, the Negro child often falls behind and cannot keep up with the whites.
It was apparent from our interviews with these principals that most of these men and women are quite alert and eager to find some means of remedying this difficult situation. Many of them have endeavored for a long time to cope with this problem, and a few think they have found ways to render more rapid progress of these children possible. But in the formal character of the school curriculum they have little freedom to develop their own schemes. These principals have practically all agreed that a system of motor-education which would emphasize the practical and industrial side rather than the purely academic, would not only benefit a large number of white children, but would prove absolutely invaluable for the colored children who, they believe, are more motor-minded than the whites. It would certainly, they think, solve the over-age problem to a large extent, and would make the children better prepared to avail themselves of the economic opportunities offered by our urban industrialism.