I found this by following a link on Don Potter's Education page to an archived Primary Education magazine: — Supt. Maxwell, of the public schools In Brooklyn, in a circular to the principals of the schools, makes a serious Indictment of the system of teaching In the grammar schools. A test was made in geometry and the result showed as follows: Four classes were marked very good, twenty-six good, forty-six fair, fittyflve poor, sixteen very poor, and twenty-five were marked failure. The answers, Mr. Maxwell says, furnish abundant evidence that the pupils relied on their memory and not on their reasoning powers, the invariable result of poor methods of teaching The written statements disclose a most deplorable lack of power In using the English language. Ok, so they created a test and tested some schools, and found 76 of them to be Proficient, Mastery, or Basic, 55 Approaching Basic, and 41 Unsatisfactory (described in our terms). So what? This article was published in 1894! (Capitalization, punctuation, and spelling are shown as printed, indicating some variance from modern practices.) So even over a hundred years ago, there was plenty of concern about whether schools/teachers/students were performing "up to standard". However, note that this was (what we would recognize as high school) geometry being taught in the grammar schools, which if I'm not mistaken, indicated in those days what we would now call upper-elementary or middle school, the 5th-8th grades.
