A Chicago newspaper reporter recently argued with the writer, school board could close thirty schools, discharge thirty principals, and dispense with about one thousand teachers if so many pupils were not permitted to fail. What a tremendous saving it would mean to the taxpayers! What this reporter said is approximately true. The equivalent of about thirty schools are kept running full time in Chicago simply to care for repeaters. Momentarily indignant at the thought of the staggering money costs involved, the newspaper man asked, How can your principals justify the fact that they fail to promote from thirty-five thousand to forty thousand pupils each semester? What is the answer? Further, why is there great variation among the schools in the percentage of pupils failed? According to the semester reports of the principals, the median elementary school in Chicago failed to promote one-eleventh of its pupil membership (average school, one-tenth) at the end of the first semester of the school year 1924-25. One school, with an enrolment of 1,583 pupils, failed to promote 558 pupils. Another school, with an enrolment of 840 pupils, promoted all but three pupils. The median school, with an enrolment of 1,207 pupils, failed o10 pupils. Table I shows the distribution of the schools on the basis of the percentage of pupils failed. In an effort to account for the highest and the lowest percentages of failure, the writer sent a questionnaire to the io per cent of the schools with the highest and the lowest failing records, a total of fifty-four schools. The principals of twenty-six schools responded. On pages 274-75 is a summary of the reasons given by the principals of thirteen schools for a small percentage of failures. In these thirteen schools the failures averaged only 3.3 per cent of the total school enrolment; in other words, only one pupil out of thirty failed.