Curriculum studies and the field of supervision have been influenced by two somewhat complementary enterprises: bureaucracy and professionalism. In education bureaucratic needs are focused on political, practical, and efficient patterns for organizing and maintaining effective institutions. Professional needs are concerned with knowledge and experience that can ensure qualified (and in most cases, licensed) workers. A third enterprise is scholarship, the work of academics in creating new knowledge associated with the needs of the other two.

In the 1890s, supervision was cast within a bureaucratic organizational framework of administration. Supervisors as administrators paid little attention to curriculum making. Administrators concerned themselves with the new political demands associated with organizing and running their schools. Curriculum and supervision seemed to have been on paths that signaled two separate evolutionary ...