The 1900s Education: Chronology

1900:     March School baths are planned for students in some schools by the New York City School Board of Education.

1900:     May 12 The College Entrance Examination Board is created.

1900:     July 11 There is "art in everything," asserts progressive educator Francis Parker in a speech pleading for the centrality of art in education before the National Education Association.

1900:     September 15 Lack of space forces the Atlanta, Georgia, school system to turn away four hundred students.

1901:     January Bryn Mawr University President M. Carey Thomas supports the equality of college education for both men and women in an article in Educational Review.

1901:     June The College Board's entrance examination is given to high school students for the first time.

1901:     June 12 Students of Bunsen School in Belleville, Illinois, strike in an effort to shorten their school day.

1901:     November 4 The reform-minded Southern Education Board meets for the first time.

1901:     December Steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie endows a science research center, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, with a gift of $10 million.

1902:     July Emory University Professor Andrew Stedd attacks lynching and supports racial moderation in an Atlantic Monthly article, which prompts school officials to ask for his resignation.

1902:     November 8 The National Education Association, the first teachers' union, is formed by the merger of The Chicago Teachers' Federation and the American Federation of Labor.

1903:     January 12 Industrialist John D. Rockefeller funnels his educational philanthropy through the newly chartered General Education Board.

1903:     April 18 Booker T. Washington's racial-accommodation approach to social and educational matters is publicly denounced by W.E.B. Du Bois with the publication of his book The Souls of Black Folk.

1903:     October 19 Judge William Gary of Augusta, Georgia, publicly declares that education makes black workers "unfit for the walks of life open to [them]," drawing national attention.

1904:     July 1 In a speech at the annual meeting of the National Education Association, labor leader Margaret Haley urges teachers to organize.

1904:     August 22 University of California President Benjamin Wheeler discourages women students from using a college education to do more than prepare them for marriage and motherhood.

1904:     October In Florida, Mary McLeod Bethune founds the Daytona Literary and Industrial Institute for the Training of Negro Girls.

1905:     February 27 Seventy percent of male high school teachers and 53 percent of female high school teachers are college graduates, according to a report by Edwin Dexter to the National Society for the Scientific Study of Education.

1905:     April 16 Steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie endows the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching with $10 million.

1905:     July One hundred percent of district superintendents and 94 percent of all high school principals are men, according to a National Education Association study of public school educators in cities.

1906:     April Vocational skills are highlighted as important to teach to students in the state's public schools by the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technological Education.

1906:     June John Hope becomes the first African-American president of Morehouse College (then named Atlanta Baptist College), a historically black college.

1907:     March 12 Alain Locke becomes the first African American to receive a Rhodes Scholarship. No other African American scholar will be so honored for half a century.

1907:     October 16 In Hattiesburg, Mississippi, school officials ask the city council to create a separate school for the children of immigrants.

1908:     February 29 The Anna T. Jeanes Foundation is created with the goal of improving schools for black students in the rural South.

1908:     November 9 The U.S. Supreme Court upholds a Kentucky law prohibiting racial integration in private schools in Berea College v. Kentucky.

1908:     December Seventy-two percent of New York City schoolchildren are either immigrants or the children of immigrants, according to a study by the U. S. Immigration Commission.

1909:     February 22 The annual meeting of the National Society for the Scientific Study of Education focuses on the subject of sex education.

1909:     July 29 In Chicago, Ella Flagg Young becomes the first female superintendent of an urban school system.

1909:     September A part-time school for employed children and youth is created by the Cincinnati public school system as the nation's first continuation school.

1909:     November 18 New York City public schools ban football.