At the end of her spring term in 1862, Martha Hale Clary bade farewell to her classmates at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary one year before she was to graduate. She was a 24 year-old teacher, the daughter of a farming family from Conway, Massachusetts, who had graduated from Westfield State Normal School five years earlier. By the autumn of 1862, she was living in an abandoned plantation house in Beaufort, South Carolina, organizing a school for the Gullah people not many miles from Confederate lines, one of the earliest participants in the Sea Islands’ “Rehearsal for Reconstruction.” For the next eleven years she taught scores of the islands’ freed slaves in Beaufort and Hilton Head, one of the hundreds of teachers sponsored by the venerable American Missionary Association (AMA). By the early 1870s, young former slaves had themselves gained sufficient education to become their people's elementary teachers, so in 1873 Martha Clary accepted a position with the Presbyterian Committee on Missions to the Freedmen to teach in its academy for black students in North Carolina, Scotia Seminary. She would remain there for another fourteen years, finally retiring to her native state in 1887 after twenty-five years of service to southern African Americans.

A noted but rarely explored axiom of the history of American education is that public school practices often originate in private sector settings. As David B. Tyack suggested in his influential study The One Best System, “Many of the innovations designed to offer differentiated schooling in the nineteenth century stemmed not so much from career educators as from wealthy philanthropists, merchants, and industrialists.” Certainly the very organizational structure of many urban school systems grew out of a network of private charity schools formed in the early nineteenth century. After the Civil War, new educational features like kindergartens, manual training, and vocational counseling all began as charitable endeavors but soon worked their way into urban public schools. By the century's end, vacation schools offering summer recreation and industrial education to the children of the urban, immigrant poor became yet another philanthropic program to enter the public school domain. What happened to vacation schools in New York City as a consequence of public administration is the focus of this article.

On 24 April 1946, Rhode Island Governor John O. Pastore signed “An Act to Guarantee and to Improve the Education of Children and Youth in This State by Providing Continuing Teaching Service.” The law stated that “three successive annual contracts shall be considered evidence of satisfactory teaching and shall constitute a probationary period” after which teachers would be granted tenure. Teachers could be dismissed only “for good and just cause” after they received tenure. However, the law contained one big loophole: it did not “prevent the retirement of any teacher under a rule of the school committee affecting marriage,” in effect leaving local school committees with the authority to fire women teachers as soon as they got married.

“The School of Tomorrow,” as envisioned by psychologists Otis Caldwell and Stuart Courtis in 1924, “will pay far more attention to individuals than the schools of the past. Each child will be studied and measured repeatedly from many angles, both as a basis of prescriptions for treatment and as a means of controlling development. The new education will be scientific in that it will rest on a fact basis. All development of knowledge and skill will be individualized, and classroom practice and recitation as they exist today in conventional schools will largely disappear.” “The School of Tomorrow,” would use mechanical equipment, radios, and movies to reveal a world beyond the limits of books and recitations. Textbooks would be constructed for individual success and to underwrite a program of self-rehabilitation. Psychologists, through “experiments in laboratories and in schools of education” would discover “what everyone should know and the best way to learn essential elements.” In the surveillant spaces of “The School of Tomorrow,” hygienically regulated students would learn essential items under “psychologically right conditions.” John and Evelyn Dewey's Schools of Tomorrow (1915) can be read similarly, where psychology and apparatus of individualization underwrite the new pedagogy. Hybrids of buildings, machines, media, and psychologies in a popularized, “modern” culture, promised distinction, excitement, health, hygiene, leisure, and prosperity.