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P. E. A. also had been stricken by Depression, was $11,000 in the hole, had only 4,000 members. Redefer saw that Progressive Education's future must be in the public schools. Dynamic Willard W. Beatty, then the association's president, and other Progressives were beginning to prevail upon the Rockefeller General Education Board and Carnegie Foundation to finance large-scale, public school studies by P. E. A. commissions, which in five years have received $1,000,000 from the General Education Board alone.
Redefer went into the field, organized regional conferences for teachers. Unlike the usual cut & dried educational convention, but alive with questions and informal discussion in which everyone takes part, these conferences today draw 5,000 teachers and parents at a sitting.
In Manhattan Frederick Redefer's headquarters are off Riverside Drive in a four-story brownstone building, filled with books and Progressive pupils' paintings (visible behind him on TIME'S cover). In his spare time he goes to parties, skis, plays tennis, sometimes rises at 6 a. m. to go figure-skating.
Can They Spell? If Progressive educators are idealists, they are at least shrewd enough not to give their opponents tangible ammunition. They do not leave their pupils' progress in reading, writing and reckoning entirely to projects and chance but come down on their youngsters with concentrated individual drill in those subjects when necessary. They have also given much attention of late to testing their pupils, giving an accounting of Progressive Education's results.
Last week, in three separate tests, the most searching of their kinds ever made, Progressive pupils came through with flying colors:
>A young professor at Ohio State University, J. Wayne Wrightstone, compared some 500 youngsters, carefully matched in intelligence, family background, calibre of their teachers, etc., in matched Progressive and traditional schools.* As has almost every examiner before him, he found that the Progressive pupils were ahead in reading, spelling, language, arithmetic.
To test previously unmeasured intangibles on which Progressives set great store, he invented ingenious new tests, using observation of pupils as well as pencil and paper quizzes. Results: Progressive pupils scored higher than those in traditional schools in knowledge of current affairs and people, honesty, cooperation, leadership, ability in creative, writing and art, critical thinking, breadth of interests. Traditional school pupils knew more about rules of health, Progressive pupils were huskier and healthier.
>From Lincoln School in Manhattan, perhaps the top-ranking Progressive school in the U. S., which is subsidized by Rockefeller money and had two Rockefeller boys as students, groups of pupils last year went to visit coal mines, steel mills, farms, TVA. This experiment was financed by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Last week, after careful tests, Ohio State's Dr. Louis Rath, an evaluator for P. E. A., reported that in a ten-day trip and six weeks of related classroom study, high-school juniors gained 15% in consistency of their thinking, became markedly more liberal, matured two years in thinking power.