Born on January 15, 1845, in Buffalo, New York, Ella Flagg grew up there and from 1858 in Chicago. She attended public schools and in 1862 graduated from the Chicago Normal School. She began teaching in a primary school that year and in 1865 was named principal of the new practice school of the Chicago Normal School. In 1868 she married William Young, a local merchant who died the next year. In 1871 she resigned her principalship and resumed classroom teaching in a high school. In 1875 she became principal of a grammar school, and in 1887 she was appointed assistant superintendent of Chicago schools. In that post she worked to improve teacher training and to include teachers in the development of administrative policies.
In 1895 Young began studying part-time under John Dewey at the University of Chicago, and on her resignation as assistant superintendent in 1899, following upon a reversal of her liberal policies, she was appointed an associate professor of pedagogy under Dewey. She received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in 1900 and was advanced to full professor. Her dissertation was published in 1900 as Isolation in the School, the first of her three volumes in the University of Chicago Contributions to Education series she wrote with Dewey; her other two were Ethics in the School, 1902, and Some Types of Modern Educational Theory, 1902.
Young left the university in 1904, shortly after Dewey did, and in 1905 she was named principal of the Chicago Normal School (a second school of that name, later Chicago Teachers College, now Chicago State University). In 1909 she was appointed superintendent of Chicago schools, becoming the first woman to head the school system of a major city in the United States. She again made the improvement of teacher training, the recognition of teachers╒ professional status, and the broadening of their responsibilities the major policy goals of her office. She also expanded the curricula of the schools to include vocational and physical training. In 1910, aided by Margaret Haley of the Chicago Teachers╒ Federation, she was elected president of the National Education Association; she was the first woman to hold that post.
In 1913 she defused a cabal within the Board of Education that planned to block her reappointment as superintendent by resigning. She resumed the post with the assurance that she would be reappointed, but when, in December, she was not, she resigned again. A public protest led by Jane Addams and others forced the resignation of four board members, and the reconstituted board reappointed Young. She resigned permanently in 1915. She was active in the woman suffrage movement, and in 1917 she became chairman of the Woman╒s Liberty Loan Committee. She died in Washington, D.C., on October 26, 1918.
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