In the spring of 1919 a small coterie of wealthy Washington matrons, private school teachers, and a sprinkling of public school people under the leadership of Stanwood Cobb organized the Progressive Education Association. Their objective was to carry the gospel of progressive education to all the children in all the public schools of the country. The PEA developed slowly and reached a peak of affluence and activity in the late 1930s. In 1955 it folded, one of the casualties of the lacerating attacks which broke out on progressive education in the early fifties. - Journal of American History.

The focus of this study is upon the Progressive Education Association itself, and one of the central issues is the extent to which it embodied the progressive education movement. The degree to which the Association maintained or diverged from a tradition of educational reform, established twenty or more years prior to its organization, is an interesting though subsidiary question and is examined particularly in chapters 1 and 8. The essential task here has been to provide a picture of the Association as it functioned, showing its pedagogical assumptions, its social and political commitments, and its research activities. It is, like many historical chronicles, a story of rise and fall. - Preface.