Monday, Dec. 10, 1951
Failure in Los Angeles
How many feet are there in a yard?
What letter comes before M--K, L,
N, or 0?
What time is it?
Such simple questions, and 657 more just like them, were put last spring to 30,000 Los Angeles schoolchildren by Associate Superintendent Maurice G. Blair. Last week parents and teachers got a look at the results and yelped with pained surprise.
Among the eleventh graders (aged 16 to 18), 3% could not tell the time shown on a drawing of a clock, 8% did not know how many feet there are in a yard, 4% could not say what letter comes before M, and 14% could not give the answer to: "What is 50% of 36?"
Eighth graders were just as bad. Though almost all (98%) could locate California on a map, 13% could not find the Atlantic Ocean and 16% failed on their own home town. One out of five could not name California's governor, one out of three wrote, "Has the bell rang?", nearly half did not know how to punctuate "April 15, 1951." Only 40% correctly answered the question: "Frank paid $8 plus 3% sales tax for a pair of shoes. How much did the shoes cost him?"
When the news broke, Los Angeles newspapers rushed it into headlines: 330 OF L.A. HIGH SCHOOL JUNIORS CAN'T TELL TIME. In scores of phone calls, parents lashed out at the schoolmen, and the schoolmen lashed right back ("If we work the kids," said Blair, "we get hell. If we don't work them, we get hell"). At an open meeting of the board of education, Superintendent Alexander Stoddard asked for $2,250,000 to hire 500 more teachers and to give special instruction to backward students.
But some citizens had serious doubts as to whether added instruction would be enough to correct L.A.'s wretched showing. Said Board Member LeRoy Edwards: "It is hard to believe that thousands of our pupils are mentally retarded. There must be something wrong with the way they are being taught." To many an L.A. parent, that was putting it mildly.
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