Faced with demands for racial desegregation of its public schools, and grasping at half measures to appear responsive, New York City's Board of Education took action in 1967 by ending medical discharges for unwed pregnant students and authorizing the curriculum “Family Living, Including Sex Education.” Approving sex education in part to avoid action on school desegregation, Gotham's school board relied on a resolution written by a parent advocacy group in 1939—a resolution the 1939 school board had rejected following months of debate on the merits of providing instruction on mammalian reproduction for junior high biology students. By the time the Board of Education revisited the issue of sex education in the 1960s, popular understanding of sexuality and sex education had changed considerably. Yet the resolution supporting sex education, submitted by the city's United Parents' Associations (UPA), had not changed at all.

In the process of promoting an agricultural appropriation bill in the 1914 legislative session, members of Congress engaged in a vigorous debate about the appropriateness of public-private collaboration in the federal government. They had discovered that the Department of Agriculture had been receiving funding directly from the General Education Board (GEB), a philanthropy established with funds from the Rockefeller family, for staff hired to engage in agricultural extension services. Representative William Kenyon of Iowa explained to his fellow Congressmen that employees “were on the pay roll of the Government; and, as I understand, the man who is at the head of the farm demonstration work received $1 per month from the Government and $625 per month from the Rockefeller Fund.” While Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi generally supported the use of private funding, he expressed the sentiments of many of his colleagues with his concern that it was “a very bad thing to get the employees of the Federal or of the State or of a city government in the habit of relying upon rich men and corporations for aid and assistance, because it brings around… a certain, perhaps dominating, influence upon the officials themselves that might be and probably would be finally detrimental to the public service or to self-respect and interest of the masses.”

“There are few if any more significant events in modern educational history than the developments which have recently taken place in methods of mental measurement,” Lewis Terman wrote in 1923 about the intelligence testing movement he did so much to pioneer in American schools throughout the 1920s. Indeed educational historians, particularly Paul Chapman, have shown that the rise of intelligence testing provoked large and relatively swift changes in public education, enabling school systems to sort and stream their students by ability on an unprecedented scale. “By 1930,” Chapman writes, “both intelligence testing and ability grouping had become central features of the educational system.” Less often talked about are the effects of intelligence testing and the concept of intelligence quotient (IQ) on early special education classes, and on the pupils who attended them. In fact, Terman recognized the significance of IQ testing to special education as well. In 1919, he wrote that IQ tests would help to turn the existing logic of learning problems on its head by proving that “the retardation problem is exactly the reverse of what it is popularly supposed to be.”

The president assembled the students shortly before they were to leave for winter break. He had a major announcement to make. Earlier that fall, the students had petitioned the president to develop an intercollegiate football program, and he had appointed a faculty and student committee to study the matter. He now was prepared to tell the gathered students whether he agreed to lead his college fully into athletics. He started slowly and told the students that their college was only six years old, much had been accomplished in that time, and many were tired and now hoping to “lie down on the new lawn under one of those new trees out there and bask in the glory that is Sacramento State College.” The president, however, was more amused than tired, as he continued. “But no! The dust blew and the rains came and then the fog! And out of the quietness and the thickness of the fog—a shout—a clamor: We want football!” The college already had an athletic program, and he tried to understand why the students would clamor for more. But, the fact remained that they had asked for football, and he now had to tell them what would become of their petition.