The section known as the West almost caught up with the North during the decade, the respective percentages being 4.4 and 4.3. Mr. Monahan’s bulletin goes briefly into the whole rural school problem. The author found 226,000 one-teacher schoolhouses in the United States, of which 5,000 are log buildings still in active use. Although more than 60 per cent of the children in the United States are enrolled in country schools, the rural aggregate attendance is only 51 per cent. With the help of recent appropriations made by Congress the Bureau of Education has undertaken to make a careful study of the needs of the rural schools, and the bulletin just issued is one of the first definite results of the work. WOMEN IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS How women have advanced from the educational ranks to the highest administrative positions in the public schools is revealed in figures just compiled by the United States Bureau of Education. Four states, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming, have women at the head of their state school systems, and there are now 495 women county superintendents in the United States, nearly double the number of ten years ago. In some states women appear to have almost a monopoly of the higher positions in the public-school system. In Wyoming, besides a woman state superintendent and deputy superintendent, all but one of the fourteen counties are directed educationally by women. In Montana, where there are thirty counties, only one man is reported as holding the position of county superintendent. The increase in the number of women county superintendents is most conspicuous in the West, but is not confined to that section. New York reports forty-two women “district superintendents,” as against twelve “school commissioners” in 1900. MOTHERHOOD AND TEACHING Motherhood and teaching collided in New York three weeks ago when the Board of Education refused to grant a year’s leave of absence without pay to Katherine C. Edgell, a high school teacher, who wanted to bear and rear a child. The board recorded its opposition by a vote of thirty-two to five. By a vote of twenty-eight to nine it shut off discussion because “too much had been published about this affair already.” Mrs. Edgell is still on the payroll of the schools, although she has not been in attendance since February first. Inasmuch as it is the custom of the board to punish unexcused absence by dismissal for neglect of duty, it seems to have no alternative but to proceed to that extremity against Mrs. Edgell. This is just what was done recently in the case of Lily R. Weeks, who was absent some time on account of the birth of a child, though the board did not know the nature of her illness. Mrs. Weeks appealed her case to the state commissioner of education, before whom it is now pending.