In the early twentieth century, a drive for educational reform converged with the progressive movement in the street-car suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts to establish a local junior high school, an innovation that was sweeping through public school systems across the country (Krug, 1964: 327-335; Bunker, 1914; Annual Reports of Somerville, 1920: 183; Smith, 1920: 139). Proponents of the junior high school argued in national educational journals and scholarly monographs that this intermediate school would provide the special education appropriate for those students making the difficult transition from childhood to adolescence (Bonser, 1915; Judd, 1918; Briggs, 1920; Koos, 1921; Smith, 1926; Spaulding, 1927; Van Denberg, 1922; Thomas-Tindal and Myers, 1927). It would earlier supply, they said, “high-school type courses,” and equip students with the managerial and technical skills increasingly demanded by the gradual expansion of the white-collar occupational sector in the early twentieth century (Foote and Hatt, 1953; Thernstrom, 1973: 50-51). These two features, a more mature educational setting and useful technical courses, would make the junior high school an effective device for keeping students in school longer and for attracting them to high school. It appealed to progressive reformers because it promised an extension of schooling, a better-informed citizenry, and improved vocational preparation. In early twentieth-century Somerville, middle-class ethnic Democrats, who sought these objectives, used the political process to install this educational reform.