The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot

by Chicago Commission on Race Relations

III. RETARDATION

1. RETARDATION IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

With the assistance of the Board of Education a selection was made of three groups of schools to be studied for comparative retardation. The group comprised six schools having the largest percentage of Negro children, six attended mainly by whites in neighborhoods where the family income might be comparable, and twelve attended mainly by children of immigrants. Table XII gives the number and percentage of accelerated, normal, and retarded children for each school, for each group, and for the whole group of twenty-four schools.

This table shows the much greater amount of retardation among schools attended by Negroes than in schools attended by white Americans or by children of immigrants. The percentage for the group attended by Negroes is 74, while for the different schools in the group it varies from 67 to 81. For the two groups of schools attended by white Americans the percentage of retardation is the same, 49, though there is greater variation among these schools than among the schools attended by Negroes. In the group attended by children of immigrants, for instance, only 32 per cent are retarded in the Jungman (Bohemian) School, while 71 per cent are retarded in the Holden (Polish) School. A similar discrepancy appears in the group attended by white Americans, where the figure is 40 per cent for the Armstrong School and 62 per cent for the Byford School.

School	Accel.	Percentage	Normal	Percentage	Retarded	Retarded Ungrad.[39]	Percentage	Total
Attended mainly by white Americans:
Armstrong	202	21	365	39	355	19	40	941
Byford	118	9	361	29	783	—	62	1,262
Harper	291	17	609	35	829	—	48	1,729
Howe	220	17	421	35	577	—	48	1,218
Key	173	25	205	29	314	—	46	692
Morse	169	14	450	37	581	—	49	1,200
Total	1,173	17	2,411	34	3,439	19	49	7,042
Attended mainly by Negroes:
Coleman	54	8	124	17	561	2	75	743
Doolittle	267	16	261	16	1,099	24	68	1,651
Douglas	136	9.3	197	13.7	1,126	—	77	1,463
Keith	77	11	93	14	497	—	75	667
Moseley	62	7.5	95	11.5	551	122	81	830
Raymond	112	13	179	20	578	—	67	869
Total	708	11	949	15	4,412	148	74	6,217
Attended mainly by children of immigrants:
Bohemian
Bryant	385	21	735	37	809	15	42	1,944
Hammond	161	12	503	34	795	—	54	1,459
Jungman	375	35	350	33	357	—	32	1,082
Polish
Chopin	298	17	631	36	818	1	47	1,748
Hibbard	392	29	445	32	535	—	39	1,372
Holden	122	11	208	18	759	—	71	1,089
Italian
Goodrich	157	14	240	22	693	—	64	1,090
Jackson	360	15	731	32	1,174	—	53	2,265
Jenner	176	11	524	33	875	—	56	1,575
Jewish
Herzel	609	25	731	30	1,085	—	45	2,425
Lawson	466	16	944	32	1,407	20	52	2,837
Von Humboldt	528	22	848	34	1,072	—	44	2,448
Totals	4,029	19	6,890	32	10,379	36	49	21,334
Totals for three groups	5,910	17	10,250	30	18,230	203	53	34,593

The retardation figures for the group of twenty-four schools studied are close to those for the city at large, 53 per cent retarded in the special group and 51 per cent for the city at large. In the accelerated group the percentage of accelerated Negro children, 11, is smaller than the percentage of accelerated white children, 17, or the percentage of accelerated foreign children, 19. This variation is not so striking as that in the normal group where only 15 per cent of the Negro children appear to make normal progress as compared with 34 per cent of the white children and 32 per cent of the foreign children. From this it would appear that there are factors in the lives of many Negro children which prevent them from making normal progress.

The degree of retardation, as shown in Table XIII is again quite different for the white and Negro groups.

The largest single groups of backward white American and foreign children are retarded less than one year (42 per cent of the white American and 39 per cent of the foreign group), and the numbers decrease rapidly as the degree of retardation increases. In the case of the Negroes 19 per cent are retarded less than one year. The decrease as the degree of retardation increases is slower than in the white groups, and many more children are retarded two, three, four, five years and more. In the white American group only one child out of 3,439 retarded children is retarded five and one-half to six years, while there are forty-one in the corresponding Negro group out of a total of 4,412. One white child is retarded six and one-half to seven years, while seventeen Negro children are retarded this amount; twelve foreign children out of 10,379 retarded children are retarded six to ten years, and thirty-seven Negro children are found in these groups.

Though the main reasons for the high degree of retardation among Negro children are set forth in the next section under "Causes of Retardation," a partial explanation is to be found in the fact that Negro parents are frequently more interested in keeping their over-age children in school than white parents, especially foreign parents, whose anxiety to have their children leave school as soon as they are old enough to get work-permits is well known.

Causes of retardation.—It is generally understood of course that comparisons of Negro with white children are hardly fair, since Negro children have not had the same opportunities as whites to make normal progress.