During the early twentieth century business titans of the era held out the idealized success of their owncorporations and leveraged local communities, states, and the nation to address perceived educational shortcomings by pressuringfor specific educational outcomes: cheap education, practical knowledge (noted as less academic rigor), and scientificmanagement. The twentieth century American K-12 curriculum reflected corporate America’s needs for a trained and pliableworkforce and the development of an educational structure that addressed teaching, learning, and administration as an extension ofthe industrial organization (see Callahan, 1962). The field of educational administration was now a university-based program ofstudy that took up the challenge to train schoolmen for their professional roles with a corporate orientation to managingschools. The foundation for educational administration was finally in place. It reflected applied and practical solutions to theadministration of schools by a growing number of professional men oriented to business solutions for education. It was not anacademic, theory based, rarified ivory tower approach to administration.
According to Iannacone (1976) educational administration programs in the early twentieth century were“relatively centralized with the dominance of practice over preparation and research” (p. 5). It was not until the middle ofthe twentieth century that the field made a conscious and focused effort to alter the dominance of practice over academic andprofessional knowledge. The dominance of practice in the training of educational administration continued through the first half ofthe twentieth century which prompted Iannacone to further claim that, “The research produced during the twenty five year period[1925-1950] when educational administration was dominated bypractitioner influence shaped by municipal reform was trivial, atheoretical and useless as a scientific base to guide practice,training or future research however useful it may have been in fostering certain administrative-political agendas” (p. 19).
The frustration of a profession that was dominated by practical and applied skill during the first half ofthe 20th century led to the reform of preparation programs during the 1950’s. This reform extolled the importance of research,theory, and academically grounded preparation for educational leaders. This set the stage for the next important movement withinthe field of educational administration.
The Behavioral, Scientific, and Theory Basis for Educational Administration
During the late 1940’s and early 1950’s the field, in its attempt to become more theory driven, embraced arational scientific method that was an extension of its environment—the university. The belief and expectation grew thatevery school administrator should be grounded in the science ofadministration and the theory of administration. “With the emergence of theory based research influenced by the social andbehavioral sciences in the 1950s programs required change” (Iannacone, 1976, p. 22). This put pressure on programs ofpreparation to change from being primarily focused on the applied to being more scholarly and academic. By 1960 the field began ashift that emphasized a more academic preparation which, in turn, “increased the conflict between the practice and research as we inthe United States move deeper into the political revolution in education” (p. 29).