During the first two decades of the twentieth century an educational awakening stirred the American South. Stimulated by Northern philanthropists and their Southern agents, the region experienced a remarkable expansion of its public educational system. In many states laws were changed to strengthen the constitutional basis of public education. The value of schoolhouses increased, illiteracy rapidly decreased, local taxes multiplied, school terms were extended, and teachers' salaries increased considerably. Historians generally view this organized school campaign as the official launching of the Southern education movement. To be sure, white missionaries and black leaders had campaigned for universal education in the South since the Reconstruction era, but in the dawn of the twentieth century white Southerners made their first vigorous, large-scale efforts to improve the region's schools. The success of the Southern education movement was a result of the combined efforts of industrial philanthropists and Southern white educators. These two groups formed a powerful new force in the struggle to determine the purpose of Southern education for both whites and blacks. The alliance between Northern businessmen-philanthropists and Southern white school officials was ratified by the creation of two major educational organizations, the Southern Education Board in 1901 and the General Education Board in 1902. The policies and programs formed by these boards profoundly shaped Southern black public education during the first half of the twentieth century.

In April 1891, the Journal of Education published a symposium on teachers' pensions, the first national attention the issue had received. The honor of opening the symposium went to U.S. Commissioner of Education W.T. Harris, who presented the case against pensions — even then, a minority view, shared by only six of the fifteen symposium participants. A general system of teachers' pensions, Harris argued, would bring undesirable persons into the profession, prevent the formation of habits of thrift, and reduce salaries, which were, Harris emphasized, rising. “Consequently,” the Commissioner said, “the teacher with an equal amount of thrift or personal economy may provide for his old age just as well as the mass of the community.” This last remark must have seemed as hollow to public school teachers as it did to a number of symposium participants, for at no time in the half century after 1870 did teachers receive more than minimal compensation. Chicago teachers argued before the Board of Education in 1895 that their salaries were much the same as they had been in 1877. A deflationary economy eased the teachers' plight somewhat through most of the late nineteenth century, but after 1900 this protection was not available. In 1905, E.G. Kimball, President of the District of Columbia Teachers' Annuity and Aid Association, appealed to Andrew Carnegie for subsidy. The situation he depicted might have been of any of hundreds of school districts across the nation—low salaries, a rising cost of living, a heavily female population bound to the city by family ties and thus unable to pursue higher salaries elsewhere. Several years later, the National Education Association (NEA) presented data revealing that in forty-four of forty-eight cities, salaries of elementary teachers were below those of laborers. Averaging only forty years of age in 1913, urban teachers had become bitter over their inability to save. Active or retired, Boston's women teachers were predominantly unmarried, burdened by the need to spend a portion of their earnings in the care of dependents, and having very limited savings or none at all.

Evaluations of both literacy and education have tended to focus on their ostensibly revolutionary consequences. Urbanization, industrial growth, the rise of a middle class and a more democratic society, and a world view attuned to the need for and inevitability of change, are classed among the results. No matter which effect is seen as most critical, education and literacy are interpreted primarily in terms of their impact over the medium- to long-term.