From 1905 to 1909 the world-famous leader of the settlement house movement, Jane Addams, served as a member of the Chicago Board of Education. Appointed by a reform mayor, Addams was nevertheless unsuccessful in her efforts to change the type of curriculum offered to students in the public schools or the pedagogical practices of the schools' teachers.

In 1904 Edwin A. Alderman, after serving as president of the University of North Carolina and Tulane University, started his twenty-seven-year tenure as president of the University of Virginia. As university president, Alderman pushed for educational reform in the elementary and secondary schools of the South.

In 1907 William C. Bagley published his popular textbook Classroom Management, in which he argued that teachers should run classrooms like a business enterprise. The book went through more than thirty printings during the next two decades and helped define how educators and...