Excerpt from Recommendations Regarding Public Education in Texas: For Consideration of the Governor of Texas and the Thirty-Fourth Legislature

For a number of years it has been well understood, both in the State and out of it, that education in Texas was not and is not yet by far as universal and efficient as would become a great commonwealth. My purpose in this writing is to present to a thoughtful people the educational situation just as it is in Texas to-day, without any coloring whatever, and to suggest some means of improving present conditions.

Reports of the United States Bureau of Education and the United States Census Bureau indicate Texas as ranking thirty-eighth in general educational efficiency among the other states of the Nation. This is not, I am sure, a pleasing bit of information to patriotic Texans; and, if it had been left with me to publish to the world Texas educational rank, the love I have for my State would have caused me to hesitate considerably before doing so; but the records speak for themselves, and the eyes of the Nation are upon Texas.

According to the United States Census of 1910, there were in Texas at that time 282,940 people ten years of age and above unable to read and write, 157,880 of whom were white people. Statistics just compiled at the State Department of Education, based on enumeration reports of census trustees, give a total of 1,433,476 scholastics seven to twenty-one years of age. A further investigation of the same records shows that only 870,000 of these children enrolled in the public schools last year, which number deducted from the estimated number of children within scholastic ages gives us the alarming number of 563,476 children who did not enter any public school during the year. By deducting 30,000 as a very liberal allowance for those who graduated within scholastic age and for those who attended private and parochial schools, we are still confronted with 533,476 children within scholastic age who should have been in school but failed to darken the doors of any schoolhouse during the whole session of 1913-14. A further study of the Department records indicates that of the 870,000 children who did enroll in the public schools last year only 56 out of every 100 attended school daily. In other words, of the 870,000 children enrolled in the public schools last year 44 out of every 100 were absent from school daily.

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