This paper examines the grammar of schooling and educational innovations that were being promulgated transnationally in the 1920s and 1930s. First, the paper explores how some elements of the grammar of schooling such as age grading, year-long courses of study and annual employment contracts for teachers were mediated by local circumstances in Newfoundland. Then it identifies progressive ideas that were being promoted by the Department of Education and discusses ways in which they were negotiated at the local level. The main argument is that, local conditions notwithstanding, Newfoundland administrators portrayed transient teachers and students as the chief impediments to the institutionalization of both the grammar of schooling and progressivism in the interwar years.