Around 1940, the Southern Association Study in Secondary Schools and Colleges and the Secondary School Study of the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools for Negroes implemented cooperative educational experimentation in the American South. This was a progressive education method for improving schools exemplified in the national Eight-Year Study. The research detailed here reconstructs the work of the two southern studies as it occurred in tandem and in connection with the Eight-Year Study and the General Education Board. The white Southern Study utilized the progressive cooperative study as a clinical technique largely divorced from democratic ideals. The black Secondary School Study leveraged the progressive cooperative study as a means to democratize African American education in the South. The findings reported here confirm and complement conclusions in the historiography of African American education, extend historical perspectives on the Eight-Year Study, and contribute to an understanding of how progressive education was interpreted and translated into practice.

In 1955, Lawrence Cremin wrote of the Cardinal Principles report, “Indeed, it does not seem amiss to argue that most of the important and influential movements in the field since 1918 have simply been footnotes to the classic itself.” During the years between the publication of the Cardinal Principles report and Cremin's remark, most of the major proposals for secondary education in the United States endorsed and elaborated the principles and practices outlined by the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE); many of these reports explicitly cited the 1918 document. Over the decade following Cremin's remark, additional reports continued this trend. During the 1950s, however, the weight of opinion about the Cardinal Principles report began to shift seismically.