The reformed boards, their superintendents, and their professional staffs had their work cut out for them. As we have seen, the city and some rural school systems had never been able to catch up with the expanding school-age population. Overcrowding was particularly a problem in the urban areas of the Northeast and the Midwest. In New York City alone, “at the turn of the century 1,100 willing children were refused admission to any school for lack of space.” The situation was as bad in other city school systems. The overcrowding was no doubt contributory to the high rate of failure and growing percentage of overage students in the city schools—over 40 percent of the total in the Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, and Minneapolis systems, according to Colin Greer. One might have expected that the major thrust of reform at the turn of the century would be these urban schools. But this was not the case. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the major concern of the public school reformers was not the overcrowded elementary schools, but the relatively underattended high schools. Though the elementary schools were not doing their job as well as might be hoped, they were at least keeping upwards of 70 percent of the school-age population off the streets and under proper supervision through their most tender years. The same could not be said of the secondary schools. As late as 1890, more than 90 percent of the fourteen-to-seventeen-year-olds (those potentially dangerous adolescents) were free of any institutional supervision. Here was a potential “social problem” much more dangerous than overcrowding and failure in the elementary grades. The progressive reformers and their colleagues had succeeded through the closing decades of the nineteenth century in drawing attention to the “youth” and “class” problems. The problems, as they themselves had pointed out, were interconnected. Problem adolescents were not going to become model wageworkers; they were much more likely to become problem workers. The solution proposed to the youth and class problems was an institutional one.