I talked with the head of a department, who had kept a careful record, and had never got supplies in less than six months, and sometimes had waited two years and a half. There were some repairs to be done to laboratory tables, and application for this work was made in the spring, so that it could be done during the summer vacation. In the fall, after school had started, along came the carpenters and the painters to do this work. Said this teacher: “The city was paying me fifteen dollars a day to teach two hundred pupils, and then it paid another fifteen dollars a day to workmen to keep me from teaching the pupils.” All this is petty graft; and the thing that really counts is Big Business, which is not considered graft. This board has the placing of magnificent new high schools which the city is building for the children of the rich, and which determine the population and price of real estate for whole districts. It goes without saying that these schools are put where the active speculators want them; three such schools are now going up in districts where there is practically no population at present. Meanwhile the old, unsanitary fire-traps in the slums are left overcrowded and without repairs. They have passed a regulation districting the city, and compelling the children to attend school in their own district. The children of the poor may not travel and attend the schools of the rich! This year there are no schools at all for many of the children of the poor, and sixty thousand of them are on part time. The reason for this is the ceaseless campaign of Big Business to starve the schools. In the columns of the “Times” you will read that the “Times” is a friend of the schools; but the teachers noted that this did not keep the “Times” from backing the treacherous program of the “Taxpayers’ Protective Association,” which lobbied through the state legislature the notorious Bill 1013, which forbade any community to increase its tax rate more than five per cent over that of the year before. The lobbyists of the association solemnly assured the teachers’ representatives at the state capital that this bill would not in any way affect the schools, and so they let it get by. Then, to their consternation, the teachers discovered that it would completely hamstring the schools! The tax rate of the previous year had been unusually low, because there had been a surplus; now, under this new law, most of the schools would have to close down.