to compare the results of supervision in the country
districts with those in urban schools without making full allowance for
these fundamental differences.

The county superintendent is in many States discriminated against in
salary as compared with other county officers, and, as a rule, no
provision is made to compensate for traveling expenses incurred in
visiting schools. This, in effect, places a financial penalty on the
work of supervision, as the superintendent can remain in his office with
considerably less expense to himself than when he is out among the
schools. In some instances, however, an allowance is made for traveling
expenses in addition to the regular salary, thus encouraging the
visiting of schools, or at least removing the handicap existing under
the older system. An attempt has also been made in some States to
relieve the county superintendent of the greater part of the clerical
work of his office by employing for him at county expense a clerk for
this purpose. These two provisions have proved of great help to the
supervisory function of the county superintendent's work, but the task
yet looms up in impossible magnitude.

The county superintendency is throughout the country almost universally
a political office. In some States, as, for example, in Indiana, it is
appointive by a non-partisan board. But, in general, the candidate of
the prevailing party, or the one who is the best "mixer," secures the
office regardless of qualifications. Sharing the fortunes of other
political offices, the county superintendency frequently has applied to
it the unwritten party rule of "two terms and out," thus crippling the
efficiency of the office by frequent changes of administration and
uncertainty of tenure.

No fixed educational or professional standard of preparation for the
county superintendency exists in the different States. If some
reasonably high standard were required, it would do much to lessen the
mischievous effects of making it a political office. In a large
proportion of cases the county superintendent is only required to hold a
middle-class certificate, and has enjoyed no better educational
facilities than dozens of the teachers he is to supervise. The author
has conducted teachers' institutes in the Middle West for county
superintendents who had never attended an institute or taught a term of
school. The salary and professional opportunities of the office are not
sufficiently attractive to draw me