In the cloistered little world of girls' private schools in Manhattan, recent years have brought marked changes. Two of the most exclusive, Miss Chapin's and Brearley, have expanded into large plants uptown on the far East Side. Oldest (40 years) and most aristocratic Miss Spence's School has been endowed, incorporated, dropped the Miss. It too has acquired a big new uptown plant at gist Street near Fifth Avenue. Founder Clara B. Spence has been dead nine years. Her successors, Miss Charlotte S. Baker (1923-29) and Miss Helen Clarkson Miller (1929-32) resigned before attaining comparable fame as great educators of New York's best daughters. Last week the Spence trustees announced their next move. To run the new Spence plant and continue the proud Spence tradition they had called upon Miss Valentine Laura Chandor, able proprietress of the foremost remaining small school for New York fashionables.
Spence parents learned what Chandor parents have known for 15 years, that Miss Chandor used to assist at the oldtime Charlton School, which the Rockefeller Foundation bought 15 years ago and turned into Lincoln School, the experimental adjunct of Teachers College, Columbia. Charlton parents persuaded Miss Chandor to start up on her own, which she did with 40 girls in East 62nd Street. Quietly, carefully, successfully ever since she has run her Chandor School, choosing 100 girls for character and breeding sooner than wealth, keeping classes small, teaching always herself, emphasizing scholarship, urging college afterwards but making sure her girls get an "education to live in the world." Spence's 176 pupils plus her own 100 would make her shift to the bigger scale of New York's other schools, but she had no change of method to announce. "It all happened so suddenly," said she, "I haven't had time to think about those things yet."