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No reasonable basis is found for the present elementary curriculum. Only about 41 per cent of the pupils entering the elementary schools complete the course. The requirements are the same for all elementary schools, regardless of which of the fifty-four nationalities or which of the numerous trades, professions, or classes of society may be predominant in their respective sections of the city. As compared with absences, all other causes of retardation are found to be slight. There is a consistent though slight decrease in the rate of promotion as the number of pupils in the class rises from thirty-five to fifty and above. Though promotion rate, measured by grades, is not greatly affected by the inability of some of the pupils to use the English language, the advance of the particular pupils is very noticeably retarded. It is hard to see how the author could have known always where to trace the cause of retardation, or to give the correct weight to each when more than one cause was operative. It is in connection with the system of reports, determination of the conditions of overage and promotion, that the most adverse criticism of the New York City system comes out. New York has not adequately met its educational needs, largely because it did not know the extent of its failure. In 1905 the city superintendent changed the time of making his report from before promotion to after promotion. He has announced since then a steady decline in the number of overage pupils. He has been able to do this by taking the age-grade census in June, after promotion, including only those pupils whose names appeared on the register at that time, and leaving out of consideration entirely the thousands who had been dropped through the year. The reports referred to above are as typical as they are misrepresentative. Bachman demands some common basis for the determination of retardation and overage. The use of such vague terms as "in a grade," with no understanding as to the time of the year at which the data shall be gathered, and no distinction between a pupil aged twelve years and a day and another aged twelve years and eleven months, makes reports meaningless if not misleading. Without a knowledge of what is being accomplished it is obviously unreasonable to expect efforts at improvement to be well directed. Many people are complaining that the statistical method is being overworked in education, and are affected with a kind of mental nausea at the sight of figures and statistical tables. Such tables are frequent throughout this work, but in the present instance the method is fully justified, and the conclusions seem on the whole clear and reasonable.

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More than two decades of interest in the history of American women as college students have recently culminated in a trio of notable books. Bar bara Miller Solomon's In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America, Helen Lefkowitz Horo witz's Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eigh teenth Century to the Present, and Lynn D. Gordon's Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era all use a rich variety of sources to bring to life the experiences of generations of women undergraduate students, mainly at prestigious colleges and large state universities. While the authors have different emphases, they share a commitment to making sense of college experiences through alumnae memoirs, letters, yearbooks, and works of fiction, as well as more conventional sources. Their inquiries intersect in their analyses of life for women on coeducational campuses during the Progressive Era and earlier years. Together, Solomon, Horowitz, and Gordon present a cohesive picture of "coeds" whose lives were entire ly controlled by the Victorian notion of separate gender spheres. The "outsiders" of the first generation espoused traditional values, studied hard, and remained on the sidelines during extracurricular activities. Beginning in the 1890s, women of the second generation proclaimed that, like men, they could devote themselves to "college" life; adhering to a separate spheres ideology, they created student government, clubs, and activ ity groups for women only. Solomon, Horowitz, and Gordon portray a form of education in which male and female students stayed entirely apart-education that did not warrant the prefix "co." 1 While this widespread image of female exclusion and subordina tion is no doubt accurate for elite colleges and large, highly visible state Christine Ogren is a doctoral candidate in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She would like to thank Jurgen Herbst, Clif Conrad, Bill Reese, HEQ's anonymous reviewers, and David Brandt for their helpful comments on drafts of this essay.