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 vacancy on the Board of Education with a squarejawed, tousle-headed young man named James Marshall. His very first day Jimmy Marshall split not only with the Tammanyites but with his Fusion colleague, supported a bill to raise the compulsory school age to 18. Before the month was out he was known as the most uncompromising member of the Board of Education.

Jimmy Marshall is the son of the late, great Louis Marshall, Jewish lawyer and philanthropist. He went to the Columbia School of Journalism, wrote a novel, Ordeal by Glory, married Novelist Lenore K. Guinzburg, eventually became a lawyer. A congenital battler for the underdog, he defended Southern Negroes before the U. S. Supreme Court, plunged into many a liberal cause. He also played Republican politics in Manhattan, where his fellow politicians lifted eyebrows at his radicalism.

Chief extracurricular activity of James Marshall, however, is fighting juvenile delinquency and crime. A onetime boys' reform school president, when he became a member of the Board of Education he promptly started a two-year survey of maladjustment and delinquency in the schools which last fall proposed an elaborate program for keeping youngsters out of mischief.

By last week he had become so glamorous a St. George to the city's schools that his more conservative colleagues, although they have often voted against him. this time unanimously elected him president of the Board of Education and top man in the world's biggest and naughtiest school system.

* Maximum salary of elementary school teacher: $3,830; high-school teacher: $4,500; high-school principal: $10,000; superintendent of schools: $25,000.

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