hs as much academic work as the regular eighth grade
pupils. There was the test.

Could these derelicts, after one year of special care, take their places
in the regular freshman high school work? After the end of the first
quarter, a study made of the 800 children in the high school showed that
on the average there were fifty-four hundredths of one failure for each
scholar. Among the twenty-seven girls from the special classes, however,
there was but seventeen-hundredths of a failure for each girl, or
one-third as many failures as in the whole school. The boys made an even
better showing. Of the entire seventeen, only one boy failed, and in
only one subject.

III The Success Habit

"We had given them something they liked and could do," Mr. Spaulding
concluded. "They succeeded a few times, got the success habit, learned
to like school, went into the regular high school course and succeeded
there."

As an illustration of the way in which the new plan works, take the case
of James Rawley. James was in a serious predicament. Time after time the
court had overlooked his truancy and misdoings, but James had taken the
pitcher once too often to the well, and the open doors of the State
Reform School stared him grimly in the face.

"It will be best for him in the long run," commented the judge. "Each
month of this wild life makes him a little less fit to keep his place in
the community. He has had his last chance."

Yet there was one ray of hope, for James lived in and out of Boston, a
city located near the Newton Technical High School. This fact led
James's custodians to propose to the judge that he give James one more
trial, this time in the Newton Technical High School. The judge, also of
the initiated, agreed to the suggestion, and James, a dismal eighth
grade failure, entered the Newton Technical High School in one of the
special transfer classes.

Just a word about James. He began life badly. His mother died when he
was young; and his father, a rather indifferent man, boarded the boy out
during his early years with an aunt, who first spoiled him through
indulgence, and then, inconsistently enough, hated him because he was
spoiled. Growing up in this uncongenial atmosphere, James became
entirely uncontrollable. He was disagreeable in the extreme, wild and
unmanageable.

The people with whom James was boarding grew tired of his continued
truancy and he was placed on a farm near Boston. There, too, he was
discon