ABSTRACT
In the 1930s the Great Depression was by far the most obvious and powerful influence on the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s schools, and the United States as a whole. Like all NEA employees, though assigned to duties in one unit, the Research Division in his case, William Carr also devoted time to a variety of tasks as assigned by his superiors. Early on he worked with the Committee on Propaganda, which was conducting a study of the undue influence on the public schools by large business interests, a focus to which Carr returned in his fiscal equity work of the 1930s. William Carr’s early work for the NEA involved topics other than state school finance. Davis's commitment to cooperative NEA professionalism was doubtlessly enhanced by her early work for the Department of Superintendence, through which she had developed an affinity for school executives that was much like what she felt for teachers.
