In a now infamous visit to the city in 1987, Secretary of Education William Bennett declared “Chicago's public schools are the worst in the nation.” There was no objective means of verifying such a statement, of course, but the remark reflected the sentiments of many people in the greater Chicago area and across the country, particularly those who lived outside big cities. Indeed, as a measure of public opinion, Bennett's assessment might have been applied by many to any of the nation's large urban school systems. In Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and nearly every other major city, public education was widely believed to be in a state of crisis—or at least besieged by very large problems. The big city schools just were not doing what they were supposed to do—provide the coming generation with the learning and skills necessary to cope with living and succeeding in a modern world. Or at least this was the perception fueled by comments such as Bennett's.

In 1890, William Sellers, leader of Philadelphia's mechanical community, signaled the end of the nineteenth-century system of workshop apprenticeship. Speaking before the Engineers’ Club he declared that “The crafts which once supplied the comforts and even the luxuries of life have been so divided and subdivided, that few masters of an art… could now find the occasion to practice it; the system of apprenticeship, which had theretofore provided a succession of skilled workmen, became impracticable with the vast army that required to be taught the special details of an art only.” The search for an alternative system started in the 1870s as owners of advanced machine works contemplated a horrifying world in which the city's youth roamed free without the steadying hand of an employer or grounding in vocational skills. In 1878 the Baldwin Locomotive Works, in association with the Spring Garden Institute, pioneered a new system of industrial training—a radical departure from nineteenth-century apprenticeship. Apprentices received instruction in the full range of manual skills from an experienced journeyman on the shop floor but, with the new system, training took place in the shop and classroom under the direct charge of the firm. Sociologist Harry Braverman suggested that the division of labor under industrial capitalism split the work of skilled mechanics by separating conception and execution of tasks. In the sphere of education, a parallel force led to the demise of apprenticeship and the triumph of industrial training. The classroom conquered the workshop.

Historians have tended to view the 1920s and 1930s as a bleak educational interlude before the catalyst of the Second World War and the radical 1944 Education Act. However, fierce and very public battles raged over the funding, facilities, and curriculum of state-aided schools and, indeed, over the ownership of many of them. These battles embraced every aspect of the nation's political, social, and religious life. This article contends that those decades were ones of complex, even dramatic, change with the inter-war period possessing its own dominant values and perceptions of how problems should be met and resolved. While some traditions were considered sacrosanct, others were cast aside. It was not a period of stagnation; indeed, to many the times bordered on the revolutionary.

Historians of United States education know well the business metaphors for schooling but not as well the military ones. A brief exploration of a contemporary educational term, the dropout, illustrates the complexities in linguistic genealogies of our school metaphors and the hazards of asserting a clear ancestry for specific educational tropes. David Angus, David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Joseph Kett, Richard Altenbaugh (with David Engel and Don Martin), and Sherman Dorn have written of the rising and falling concerns about adolescent school-leaving over the past century. What has concerned this venture, in a minor way, is pinning down the first appearance of “dropout” (or similar phrases) in reference to schooling. The question of when dropping out became a recognized social problem was central to Dorn's research, but Altenbaugh et al., Stephen Lassonde, and Tyack and Hansot have also discussed the use of the word itself.