Dr. Robert Haskell was instated as the WCTS's superintendent, and he immediately began working toward making the WCTS a leading research institution under the auspices of the McGregor Fund and the school’s progressive founders, who sat on its governing board. Bringing Dr. Thorleif Hegge onto its staff in 1929 as head of the Department of Research was Haskell’s first step. He bestowed upon Dr. Hegge the task of directing the team of researchers that would accomplish this grand goal, and come to be known internationally as the McGregor Laboratory. Two prominent scientists, Dr. Heinz Werner and Dr. Alfred Strauss, fled Nazi Germany in 1937 and joined the WCTS staff. This cemented the foundation of what would flower over several decades into the WCTS's most lasting academic triumph; the validation of its once-laughable assertion that the “un-teachable” could be taught.

          The main breakthrough Drs. Werner and Strauss made by studying the WCTS children was in identifying two types of feeblemindedness: “endogenous” and “exogenous” types. This defined whether a child’s learning disability was the result of physical damage to the brain, or due to external factors such as having been neglected during their formative years. The two scientists found that the two groups responded differently to the same learning stimuli. Though Werner and Strauss’s work certainly came under its share of criticism, they strongly influenced a number of subsequent researchers who carried their ideas forward. The WCTS’s real contribution to science wasn’t so much what it accomplished, but what it started—Strauss and Werner helped initiate a sea change in the way society looked at and understood childhood learning problems and incorrigibility. They had laid the basis for a diagnosis they would later call the “Strauss Syndrome.” What had once been a series of symptoms of unknown cause that were never considered as being related was now identified as a single condition of probably common origin. They had “medicalized” the concept of learning difficulty, and paved the way for the naming of a clinical condition that could be addressed with scientific treatment programs and social reforms. This earned them widespread recognition—though not so much amongst scientists as with educators and parents. Almost every single text available on the history of special education or learning disabilities cites Strauss’s work and collaborations at the WCTS as the origination of the discipline of studying learning difficulty.

          Equally as important as its scientific quest, the WCTS became the hands-on training center for future leaders in the learning disabilities movement. Partnerships were developed with local colleges and universities, where psychology students could receive lab credit for internships at WCTS. All these affiliations served to further cement the WCTS’s reputation as the premier training ground for future researchers, administrators, and teachers in the expanding field of studying mental deficiency. Superintendent Haskell himself taught a course in institutional administration for University of Michigan.

          Haskell often entertained experts from abroad in his “mansion” at the WCTS, which was provided to him at county expense. It seems there was a never-ending stream of interested parties making the trip out to see and learn about the school throughout its first 25 years. In 1930 one of India's leading medical doctors, a noted Dr. S.R.S. Rao, came to spend a week at the WCTS, as guest of Dr. Haskell. At a banquet of the Northville Fathers and Sons, the superintendent stated that from all over the world leading experts—and in a few cases, members of royal families—were visiting Northville to see the WCTS and study its methods. Haskell wondered aloud to those assembled whether “we who live in Northville know of the fame of the community throughout the world.”