The situation has been tense, but social workers in Pittsburgh do not anticipate that the Legislature will respond to the manufactured agitation and put the schools back in the hands of the ward boards whose long regime left conditions that can not be remedied in years. A bill introduced this week would make the central board elective. Theoretically there are arguments in support of the election-at-large of members of the centralized board, but the appointive board was regarded as a necessary measure if the schools were to be freed from the domination of the old boards. Efficiency has been the new board’s watch-word. Janitors and teachers are not appointed on the basis of political “pull.” Already the high school attendance has increased over 60 per cent. Manual training, cooking and sewing classes are now found not only in wealthy districts, but also in sections where boys and girls need such training most. The one point in which the new board has been weak was the failure to establish sympathetic relations with the public in the reforms it is putting forward and to utilize publicity as a constructive force in the securing of them. This indifference to public opinion, although only apparent, has been mistaken in many quarters as contempt, especially because of the autocratic personalties of two members of the board. It is perhaps unfortunate that the board’s president, David Oliver, is a brother of Senator Oliver, thus giving a decided political turn to newspaper discussion. He was the logical man for the place, a leading member of the state school commission which drafted the new code. As president of the old board in Allegheny, now the north side, he had helped to make the schools of that section far superior to those of the old city; this, in spite of the fact that civic conditions in Allegheny were even worse than in Pittsburgh. The unfortunate Heeter affair is in fact but an incident in the forward movement toward responsible municipal rule in Pittsburgh. STANDARDIZING CHILDREN’S CARE Judge John E. Owens of the Cook County Court, Chicago, has the distinction of having inaugurated the service of social investigators, of having extended the court’s supervision over thirty-three child-helping agencies and of having promoted their close co-operation with the court and with each other. Although Judge Owens has a contingent fund for the employment of other judges to assist him in passing upon cases of insane and dependent persons, he prefers to do all the work himself and use the money for four social investigators. They report upon the conditions involved in each case, and, aided by this information, the judge enters his decision.