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This chapter explores how rightist women attempted to shape school curricula through textbook censorship and other means, including forcing resignations of teachers and school administrators who did not think as they did. It examines the work of Lucille Cardin Crain and her work for the Educational Reviewer, as well as the actions of women throughout the country as they fought to eliminate progressive education from public schools. Rightist women published newspapers, journal articles, and books that promoted their views on education. They were elected to school boards, and they participated in campaigns to rid schools, libraries, and the PTA of what they considered leftward-leaning ideas.

This chapter situates Arthurdale within the discourse of progressive education during the late 1920s into the early Depression era. It discusses the ideas behind progressive education and how the progressive education movement changed during the 1930s in response to the Depression. The chapter addresses the four major groups of influence in progressive education during this time, including the social reconstructionists, the child-centered progressives, the administrative progressives, and the community-centered progressives. Leaders of the progressive education movement included Francis Parker, John Dewey, Elsie Clapp, William Heard Kilpatrick, and George Counts. This chapter describes educators’ reactions to the problems that the Depression posed to schools and that set the stage for the Arthurdale School experiment.

George I. Sánchez was a devotee of the intellectual tenets of the Progressive Education Movement, particularly its social reconstructionist wing, and of the New Deal. The GEB funded a small division within New Mexico's state educational bureaucracy for Sánchez to give him the opportunity to preach reform for the state's schools. A crusading bureaucrat, Sánchez generated a great deal of controversy over his advocacy of studying racial prejudice and for proposing a restructuring of school funding mechanisms that would take initial steps to equalize New Mexico's poorest and wealthiest schools. Sánchez's schemes to turn New Mexico into a hotbed of educational progressivism and research on Mexican Americans generated dangerous controversy.

Chapter 6 pivots back to liberal evangelicals, exploring the ways they tried to cope with this “new New York.” Using the Union School of Religion at Union Theological Seminary, an experimental Sunday school run by the Methodist George A. Coe in the 1910s and 1920s, as a lens, it examines the tensions that emerged between Coe’s liberal evangelicalism and the more progressive and pluralist ideology of many of his followers. Union Seminary’s decision to shut down the school illustrates both the clear boundaries, but also the ultimately tenuous nature, of liberal evangelicalism

In this chapter an attempt is made, in the light of evidence from the United States and Canada, to explain in general terms the ebb and flow of private school options. Both public and private school growth and decline are affected by demography. Thus, a massive drop in Catholic school enrollment from 1966 to 1981 reflects, in part, a birthrate decline and a migration of Catholics from central cities, where many Catholic schools existed, to suburbs, where there were few Catholic schools. But unlike public school attendance, which rarely involves user fees and is considered normal if not laudatory in the United States and parts of Canada, private school attendance generally occurs when parents decide to depart from normal practice, incurring extra cost, extra effort (many private school patrons must drive their children considerable distances to school), disruption of their children’s friendships (many private school students are not in the schools which most of their neighborhood friends attend), and sometimes social disapproval. To a far greater extent than public school enrollment, then, private school enrollment depends on patron motivations. To return to the Catholic example: Even if the Catholic birthrate were high and Catholic schools were universally accessible, those schools would soon collapse unless many Catholic parents considered them worth extra expense and effort. Also, while public schools are everywhere available, parents often cannot find the private schools they prefer. Some schools exist primarily for certain religious and ethnic groups. Schools of some types are available only in a few major cities. Some schools are beyond the fiscal reach of most people. It is no accident, in this regard, that religious options are more plentiful in private schools than curricular or pedagogical options. Most religiously oriented schools enjoy subsidies from religious groups. Many schools open in the facilities of churches and synagogues, thus avoiding major expense. Sometimes churches and other denominational agencies directly sponsor schools. Even when they do not, they often assist by taking special collections, or their members provide free labor. Many Jewish day schools are subsidized through Jewish community funds.