Education: Experiment in Glass

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The teachers begged and scolded, but still the windows got broken. In one year (1946), Chicago's school board paid out $271,897 just to mend windows that the schoolkids smashed. Finally, the exasperated board promised to give $22,000 worth of books to the schools with the fewest broken panes. The plan worked: last year, Chicago's broken schoolhouse panes dropped from 66,799 to 37,105.

This year, the board decided to spend five times as much on such prizes as a tape recorder, a portable playback, a 16-mm. projector, an AM-FM radio receiver, books for the school library. Last week, the board announced that in the first four months of 1948, broken windows had dropped another thousand.