F. P. O'Brien

Francis Paul O'Brien was an American education writer and researcher born in 1885. The main biographical detail that could be confirmed here is his birth year, along with his authorship of The High School Failures: A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or Commercial High School Subjects.

That book was published in 1919 by Teachers College, Columbia University, and was originally presented as his Columbia thesis. In it, he studied school records to explore patterns in failure, persistence, and dropout among high school students, making the book an early data-driven contribution to educational research.

Reliable personal details beyond those points were not clearly available from the sources reviewed, so it is safest to remember him primarily through this influential study and its close attention to how schools measure student success and loss.