However, the coal companies sometimes played a role in improving conditions. Seeing a need to have a more literate work force to reduce accidents, increase productivity, and stabilize a mobile work force, one authority claims that the coal companies helped ensure passage of progressive educational legislation that required teachers' pay to be based on qualifications, not color. Eventually, access to education began to change for the better for children of the coal fields. Newly formed unions pushed for better education and for state laws that would require the certification of miners. The coal companies began to realize the necessity for better educated workers.
Various writers cite a variety of reasons for that concern.
One believed that the coal companies thought battling ignorance through education could help preserve the socioeconomic order and thus eliminate a major source of strikes. Other observers believed the coal operators saw the link between schooling and socioeconomic stability. In 1914, one West Virginia school began teaching courses related to mining. About 1930, the West Virginia State Board of Education added a course in coal mining to the public school curriculum. Around the same time, in Kemmerer, Wyoming, the State Board of Vocational Education and the U.S. Bureau of Mines, with cooperation from the local mining industry, opened a two-year trade preparatory course in coal mining and related courses for mine workers in the area.