EFFICIENCY AND PREPARATION OF RURAL

SCHOOL TEACHERS.

I. EFFICIENCY OF RURAL TEACHERS NOW IN THE

SCHOOLS.

METHOD OF PROCEDURE.

The first section of the study is based on a simple questionnaire addressed to nearly 6,000 teachers at work in the rural schools. It was deemed impracticable to communicate with all the large army of approximately 267,000 rural teachers in the field. Accordingly, a careful selection of numbers was made, by counties, in each of the 48 States, in such manner as to make this typical of all the several geographical sections of the country, with their own educational characteristics and peculiarities.

The final comparative figures are not based on the educational status of individual States, but on that of the States by grand divisions of the country, viz, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, South Central, North Central, and Western. It would have been eminently unfair to have based the figures upon a ranking by States, since it was necessary to limit the study to one or two typical counties in each State. It is believed that under the group system of comparison, involving as it does a range of from 8 to 12 typical counties to each geographical division, the study is sufficiently intensive for the law of averages to become effective.

As a first step of procedure, special collaborators of the Bureau of Education, residing in the different States, or the local State department of education, or both working together, selected for use in the investigation 3 to 5 counties typical of their particular States. The number of counties selected in this manner-192 in all-was further reduced to 55 before the correspondence began. These 55 counties appeared to contain all the marked geographical and topographical peculiarities of the grand divisions that might reasonably be expected to have influenced the local educational development to be found in the larger list of counties. For instance, the counties selected in the South Atlantic division represent every geographical variation; the Atlantic coastal plain, the Piedmont, the great mountain valleys, and the Appalachian belt are all included. In similar manner the

richness or comparative poverty of the soil and population, whether agricultural, mining, lumbering, or stock raising, native or foreign, black or white, have all entered ir to the final consideration.

The questionnaires were filled in and returned by 2,941 of the persons addressed, this being about 50 per cent of the total number on the lists. The resulting data were thereupon compiled and tested from other sources and tabulated, as will appear from a study of the following pages. Graphic charts have been added wherever it was deemed feasible.

Table 1, following, summarizes all the data by States and grand divisions under captions based on the queries sent out. It shows that 55 counties are included in the study, with a total of 2,941 teachers reporting. Of these, only 697, or a little over 25 per cent, are males. There are 529 men and women, or exactly 18 per cent of the whole number, who are married. There are 1,937 teachers giving instruction in eight grades or more, which means that fully 66 per cent of all the teachers have from 22 to 35 or more recitations daily. Very few teachers are provided with homes by the boards of education. Most of them board and lodge in the district where they teach, although 526 report that they do not reside in the school community. The length of teacher experience is a little more than 45 school months for each teacher, divided among 3.4 schools. The figures for academic preparation show that 117, or 4 per cent, of the teachers have had less than eight years of elementary school preparation; 950, or 32.3 per cent, have had no professional preparation whatever; and only 20 teachers report attendance at schools making a specialty of preparing teachers for rural schools.