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LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL.`

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR,

BUREAU OF EDUCATION, Washington, September 20, 1915.

SIR: Within the past few years there has been a very remarkable increase in public school extension and the wider use of school buildings and equipment. This extension work has taken many forms, all of which, however, are intended to be supplementary to the regular school work. In order that records of this work may be kept and that teachers, school officers, and students of education may be able to compare the school extension work of one city with that of another, it is very desirable that there shall be some uniform system of records. At my request such a system has been worked out very carefully by Mr. Clarence Arthur Perry, of the Russell Sage Foundation. This Bureau has undertaken to provide the proper blanks for use in working out this system, and Mr. Perry has had the hearty cooperation, advice, and suggestions of many school superintendents and their assistants. I recommend that this manuscript be published as a bulletin of the Bureau of Education.

Respectfully submitted.

The SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR.

P. P. CLAXTON,

Commissioner.

SIGNIFICANT SCHOOL EXTENSION RECORDS.

UNIFORMITY IN RECORD KEEPING.

A manufacturer of pig iron computes his cost per ton in exactly the same way year after year, because such figures faithfully mirror the efficiency of his producing plant. If cost per unit does not decrease with increase of output, something is generally wrong and an examination is started. But change the method of figuring costs and his system is at once put out of joint. In no field of production is there an unvarying level of per unit cost. New refinements of process, new economies in operation are continually appearing, and unless the records of output or results kept before the changes are precisely comparable with those kept afterwards, the value of the improvements can not be correctly appraised.

A manufacturer not only insists upon uniformity in the successive computations of his costs, but he would pay a very liberal price if his business competitors would use his method in calculating their costs and let him have the figures. The advantage of knowing a rival's cost figures, which is so eagerly sought and so seldom attained by the private entrepreneur, may be enjoyed freely and openly by public-service administrators if they but observe a very simple requirement. They have only to agree upon what facts about their common operations they all desire to know, to put into practice in their own offices indubitable methods of collecting the data agreed upon, and to transmit them to the central tabulating and publishing

agency.

School extension officials have as yet received no appreciable benefit from the statistics of systems other than their own, because the data published in the various offices are not comparable. A city's statistics for one year can be compared with its own figures for previous years, but seldom with those put out by any other city. Whether city A, with its form of administration, makes one dollar accomplish greater, equal, or smaller results than city B obtains from the same amount of money with its kind of machinery nobody can tell from the reports at present published.

A notion is abroad that there are two kinds of statistics, one set for publication and another for administration, and that they are necessarily different in nature. It is because this fallacious idea has

been so generally put into practice that statistics have been stigmatized as "dry." As a matter of fact, few figures are more intrinsically interesting than those which heads of great corporations demand of their engineers and statisticians and upon which they rely so largely for guidance in the conduct of their businesses. Unless data enable the beholder to grasp easily and quickly the vital facts of an operation, its cost in human effort, and its results in human. happiness, they are worthless to both the student and the administrator. They can not be of value for the direction of the enterprise without having a meaning for the investigator and the historian.

Agreement upon the vital and recordable facts in school extension has not yet been feasible, because its activities are still so varied and unstandardized. With the maturing of after-school systems, however, programs will become more and more alike in fundamentals, and the ideas of administrators as to the facts that should be recorded will gradually approach agreement. But by that time the local record-keeping methods will have become so crystallized and so embedded in administrative machinery that bringing them into conformity with a uniform system will be a painful and difficult task. And the past data will not often be comparable with those which are collected after standardization has taken place. So, while any attempt to promote agreement and uniformity in school-extension record keeping at this early stage must necessarily be beset with many obstacles, any progress that may be made is bound to reduce the strain of future readjustments and to hasten the benefits of standardized reports.

Agreement among the authorities upon the recordable and desirable facts of school-extension work, which is the first step in the securing of uniform records, might have been sought by means of the questionnaire method. It did not seem, however, a hopeful way of beginning. The terminology in this field is still unfixed, the experience of administrators is widely varied, and the undertakings in many municipalities are as yet entirely too tentative in organization to make it at all probable that a sound consensus of opinion could be obtained through a circularization of the officials in charge.

The only other way of initiating a movement for uniform records is represented by the present endeavor. It consists of a tentative definition of the school-extension facts which are deemed worthy of systematic collection, an explanation of their worthiness, and a series of blank forms designed to facilitate the keeping of the suggested records.

Many of the kinds of school-extension facts which are defined herein were used in a recent bulletin of this bureau, entitled "The Extension of Public Education," 1 and some notion of their significance and value

1

1 Bulletin, 1915, No. 28.

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