Report Card

[Alarmed by a report by Deputy Mayor Henry Epstein that "in June 1954, 20,000 New York City children, from the fourth to the sixth grades alone, showed a reading retardation of two years or more," the city school board announced that the old policy of automatic promotions is out.

Beginning next fall, any second-grader who is still not prepared to read by the end of the year will stay in the second grade. If at the end of his third year he has fallen two years behind, he will either 1) get special help in his regular grade, or 2) be transferred to an "opportunity class" for intensive remedial work.

P: For implacable critics and perpetual reformers of U.S. education, President Henry Wriston of Brown University had a few words of advice in the Educational Register: "One of the most extraordinary burdens under which American education labors is psychological--namely, the assumption that reform is impossible unless failure is admitted. Thus one who speaks of the great achievements of the past is immediately labeled as one who does not want change. Only those who are ready to assert that all the labor and energy, all the sacrifice and skill, all the character and brains that have been poured into the educational enterprise have resulted in failure are really progressive and ready for new developments. In point of fact the precise reverse is true. Reform proceeds best by capitalizing upon the momentum of success for further progress."

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