Education: Crime Fighter

New York City's school system, with 1,110,000 pupils and 38,000 teachers, is the largest in the world. Its teachers are the best paid.* It has the biggest, most expensive school buildings. It also has some 20,000 habitual truants, turns out swarms of young criminals. Until a few years ago nearly one-third of its pupils were retarded, barking their shins against its iron, assembly-line curriculum.

But in 1934, Reform Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia began to break the 17-year rule of Tammany Hall over the city's public schools. One February day in 1935 he filled a...

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