Rural Education

In Search Of A Better Way

Paul M. Nachtigal, Paul Nachtigal Director

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367286293
• eBook ISBN: 9781000310382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The close-knit, personal nature of small rural communities results in school and community operating as a single integrated social structure. Useful rural school improvement strategies must, therefore, address needs that are recognized by both the local school and the community and must operate in a style congruent with the local setting. Although outside ideas and resources may contribute greatly to successful plans to improve rural schools, a high level of local involvement is essential in determining the specifics of those plans. This is clearly demonstrated by the thirteen case studies presented in this book, in which the strategies that have been effective over time in resolving rural school problems are distinguished by a high degree of local participation. The cases–chosen to provide good examples of particular strategies and also to represent the diversity that characterizes rural America–cover centrally designed, heavily funded programs as well as small-scale, locally initiated efforts in such areas as teacher training, the introduction of new curricula, and community participation in education decision making and political action. The final chapters analyze the case studies in practical terms and recommend policy and practice for future rural school improvement.

Part 1
Rural Education in America: Some Background

1
Education in Rural America: An Overview

Paul Nachtigal

A three-story red brick elementary school, vintage 1900, dominates the highest point in Fort Gay, West Virginia, population 792. Its elevation belies the poor educational opportunities available to the thousand or so students drawn from a twenty-five-square-mile area where presidential candidate John F. Kennedy learned the meaning of Appalachian poverty. Across a dirt playground to the south is a prefabricated metal structure where the elementary school children and then the high school students of the neighboring Works Progress Administration-built high school file through to eat a hot lunch. Many students opt for hotdogs and soda pop dispensed from a crackerbox-size restaurant that fronts on school property and serves only students. The school in Fort Gay—as far west as you can get in West Virginia—is noted for its student-operated FM radio station; the community is known for its beer parlors that serve the suds-dry town of Louisa, Kentucky, just across the Tug River.

South Umpqua Consolidated School District 19 in southwest Oregon serves Canyonville (population 1,100), Myrtle Creek (population 3,000), the sprawling unincorporated town of Tri-City, the outlying rural population in the lush green valleys of Douglas fir country. South Umpqua High, a small-town version of big-city “suburban high,” is located in Tri-City just off Interstate 5, the main north/south highway of the three Pacific states. Reflecting the national consolidation movement, the old high schools in Canyonville and Myrtle Creek are now junior high schools making room at the elementary level for more students. Not atypically, there was a long battle over the consolidation move, which resulted in removing the two high schools from their respective communities and the building of South Umpqua High. To add fuel to community dissension, there was a heavy snow on the day of the election, which prevented the more isolated populace from being a part of the decision making.

The San Juan County, Utah, school district sprawls in seemingly endless fashion across the northwest corner of Four Corners, the only place in the United States where four states meet (Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah). The district’s 7,799 square miles include wide open spaces, the beautiful vistas of Monument Valley, and a population of 10,000 souls about evenly divided between Navajos and Anglos. An old two-story elementary school flanked by a new high school with a new vocational school across the street serve the Blanding community, which sits in the middle of the district. Until recently it also served most of the Indian population farther south. A new high school for the vegetation-poor but resource-rich Navajo reservation just completed at Montezuma Creek, twenty-four miles to the southeast, serves the white energy-company employees and the surrounding Navajo community. Indian communities in the extreme southwest corner of the district, reachable only by traveling through neighboring Arizona, are still waiting for a school to serve their area. An all-Indian elementary school at Bluff, which serves a traditional Navajo community, and a predominantly Anglo K-12 system in Monticello at the opposite (northern) end of the system complete the physical facilities of the San Juan County school district, the largest geographically in the nation. As is traditional in dominantly Mormon (Latter Day Saints) communities of Utah, LDS “‘seminaries”—a kind of chapel to offset the ban on religion in public schools—have been built adjacent to most attendance centers.

The Alden, Iowa, Community School enrollment of 400 in K-12 is the product of a school consolidation in 1958 that educationally married the two small farm communities of Buckeye and Popejoy. A middle school attendance center is maintained in Popejoy eight miles to the northwest, and the remainder of the students are bused to Alden (population 876). In middle American fashion, the well-kept school shares the center of the community with an equally well-spruced Methodist church across the street.

The superintendent in Alden has held his position for eighteen years and teacher tenure averages ten years. These figures are above the national rural average, perhaps in part because the school has one of the highest salary schedules in the state for schools its size. This commitment has added up to excellence in teaching; for example, the high school science teacher has received the Iowa Academy of Science Award on two different occasions, and the home economics teacher has been recognized as outstanding teacher of the year by peers across the state. Community support of the schools is reflected in the recent approval of an $850,000 bond issue, an increasingly rare event in both urban and rural America. The Iowa Department of Public Instruction officially speculates that the move was “protective building,” designed to ward off pressures to consolidate with Iowa Falls (population 6,654), six miles to the east.

The Fort Gays, Aldens, Blandings, and Canyonvilles of this country are home for the 54 million individuals who live outside America’s designated urban areas. The 12,000 school districts in these communities constitute 75 percent of the operating school systems of the nation, educating approximately one-third of all students attending public schools.

The misperceptions about life in rural America are many. There are those, perhaps the majority, who feel that because of improved transportation and instant communication rural America will/has become just a more sparsely populated version of urban America. Sociologists John Friedman and John Miller represented this view when they wrote in 1965, “From a sociological and indeed economic standpoint what is properly urban and properly rural can no longer be distinguished. The United States is becoming a thoroughly urbanized society, perhaps the first such society in history.”¹ Educational policymakers, apparently agreeing with this perspective, have pursued what David Tyack has described as a one-best-system model of education, which not only fails to recognize urban/suburban/rural differences, but ignores the needs of unique populations as well.²

An opposing perspective sees rural America as “the people left behind”—a part of the country where 14 million Americans live in poverty.³ This perspective, updated by Frank Fratoe, describes rural America as being behind its metropolitan counterparts in terms of wage levels, family income, adequate housing, and access to education and health care. Rural school systems have relatively fewer support staff and services, less revenue, and lower per-pupil expenditures. Children in rural America begin school later, progress more slowly, and attain fewer years of education than their urban/suburban counterparts. In addition, rural residents are less likely to enter college, receive vocational training, or enroll in adult education programs.⁴

The communities of Mileston, Tchula, Lexington, Durant, Goodman, and Pickens are all served by the Holmes County, Mississippi, school system. They also have in common the characteristics of being rural, poor, and predominantly black. Remnants of the civil rights movement that made this a target county still remain. In Lexington, the United League has organized an unsuccessful attempt to boycott white-owned businesses to get better jobs. The sharecropper system has virtually disappeared; yet 800 blacks in Holmes County still live on plantations, where for three months of the year they chop and pack cotton for minimum wages or less, depending on what the landowners negotiate. During the other nine months they survive on their meager wages, government assistance checks, and whatever food they may have grown.

County schools were desegregated more than a decade ago, resulting in a black-controlled school system composed of 99.5 percent black students. The 1,350 white students attend the five private academies in the county. Blacks may run the schools, but the economy, dominated by operations like the 2,000-acre Egypt plantation, is firmly controlled by whites. The abandonment of the public schools by whites has eroded local financial support to the point that 40 percent of the operating budget comes from the federal government, according to the assistant school superintendent.

Another view sees rural America as a place where the good life can still be lived. Freshly painted farmsteads and neat, well-kept towns appear in orderly section-line fashion throughout the rich farmland of the Midwest. Devils Lake, North Dakota, is a farming community and trade center an hour and a half drive west of Grand Forks. Located within the watershed of the Red River, the area around Devil’s Lake is some of the richest farmland of the country. Huge $60,000 tractors, with air-conditioned cabs, stereo music, and two-way radios, till the soil. Commercials on local TV stations show such rigs driving off into the sunset, reminding third-generation farmers, who know only the tales of eating dirt behind a team of horses, that a Monrow plow can be folded up to meet the width requirements of the highway and headed home without the farmer ever leaving the comfort of the cab.

It is not too unusual, observers claim, for farmers with large spreads to work an average of eight to ten weeks out of the year—four or five weeks to get the crops in the ground, and four or five weeks to harvest. With no cows to milk and chickens to feed—those necessities being supplied by the giant grocery chains that hire people to shovel the manure and tend the hens and cows daily—they are free to travel and enjoy the good things in life during the long, hard North Dakota winters.

Although some are poorer than others in Devil’s Lake, poverty is not obvious. The political process is relatively open and no one “owns” the area, residents claim. The schools are new or well-kept and the most modern equipment and progressive educational programs are in evidence, largely because of the close ties to the university in Grand Forks. The educators complain of the inevitable tight budgets, but they acknowledge that discipline problems are manageable. Devil’s Lake is a good place to live, its residents insist.

A rapidly growing perspective views rural America as a place where city folks go to play, relax, and “drop out.” It is a place where one can escape the intensity, stress, and noise of the city to fish, ski, boat, breathe fresh air, and enjoy the scenery. With greater and greater frequency urban dwellers are making the decision to opt for a more relaxing life-style on a small acreage or in a rural village.

James and Carolyn Robertson, who are part of this movement, argue in The Small Towns Book that with this renewed interest lies the possible extinction of the rural culture.

Lacking knowledge of [rural culture’s] workings, we tend to regard it with indifference while we absorb its virtues. Like a less “developed” society, it is largely passive. Unaware of our effect, we damn it for being backward and then for being corrupted. … Continued migration of urban populations to rural communities will speed the process of suburbanization, for acculturation takes place in any instance in which new residents make demands on their new surroundings that require the establishment of services or facilities not demanded by previous residents and not indigenous to the prevailing occupational and social patterns.⁵

Wilmington, Vermont (population 1,586), lies on the eastern border of the Green Mountain National Forest. Just north of the Massachusetts line, the adjacent ski areas of Haystack, Hogback, and Mount Snow have turned the once-declining agricultural community into a booming recreational area. Swiss chalets and A-frames now share the valleys with the traditional white clapboard Vermont farmhouses. Main-street businesses, once abandoned, have been refurbished. One such establishment, Pancho’s, caters to the American skiing craze with Mexican food and an Australian folk singer, who entertains with ballads of sailing the seven seas.

Wilmington is rural America in transition. Its once commonly held values are being challenged by the new ideas of “flatlanders,” as the tourists are termed. Accustomed to urban amenities, the flatlanders are demanding new services of the schools and community. The children of more liberal, often one-parent families exhibit behavior different from that of local youth. Wilmington schools, because of their centrality to the community, have become one of the primary battlegrounds on which these cultural differences are played out.

The study team’s travels in rural America suggest that the Friedman-Miller view of urbanization is too limited. We found a diversity that cannot be captured by a single perspective. Our travels to Lakota, Westbend, Fort Gay, Myrtle Creek, and other communities have convinced us that rural America is very much with us. The fact that it has largely been ignored in public policy has not made it go away.

In general, the layers of bureaucracy found in large urban/suburban communities are lacking in small communities. Communication can, therefore, be more direct, and verbal transactions can be substituted for written communiques. The validity of information is likely to be based as much on who said it as on what was said. Social relationships are more personal and tightly knit; people are known as individuals, not just statistics. Small-town rural society is generally more integrated, with individuals performing multiple roles. Running the town’s business is a part-time job; construction workers still have multiple skills; doctors, when available, are general practitioners, not specialists; businesspeople tend to be entrepreneurs, not employees of large retail chains. Values tend to be more traditional, with more family structure intact, although this is changing in communities where in-migration is taking place. Traditionally, rural communities are more homogeneous in terms of race and socioeconomic status. Time is still measured by the seasons of the year rather than the ticking of a time clock. In rural areas, a man’s word is still likely to be a binding agreement; trust is not yet a thing of the past.

Obviously the characteristics distinguishing rural communities from urban communities are not clear cut; rather, they form a continuum of rural to urban, with communities falling at different points depending on their size, location, and cultural history.

Schools serving small rural communities at the time of this study are the products of at least one round of school consolidation, a movement begun around the turn of the century. The movement resulted in the closing of most small country schools and the busing of children to the central school in town. Some parts of rural America have now completed a second round of consolidation. Interestingly enough, the new structures built as a result of the reorganization have often ended up not in town but out in the country. The rivalry of the neighboring towns involved in such mergers is sufficiently intense to rule out locating the new building in any one of the affected communities. With consolidation, busing has become an accepted part of rural education. Children in some of the large western school districts ride an hour or more one way. Problems related to busing—who gets picked up, where, and when; discipline; the purchase and maintenance of equipment—often consume more time for local boards and administrators than instructional matters.

The design of rural schools has been dictated by the prominent educational architectural style of the time rather than by any unique needs or opportunities inherent in rural communities. The oldest buildings still in use (circa 1900) are generally of the square two- or three-story brick construction design. The typical interior is noted for dark, squeaky wood flooring that has taken on the permanent smell of the “burnt cylinder” oil used for maintenance. Because the school was built before it was deemed necessary to have a full-time administrator, the principal’s office is tucked into that nonusable space at the head of the stairs.

The next era of construction, the 1930s, was influenced by the austerity of the times and the need for a straightforward design that could be built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the New Deal’s contribution to employment and public education. The two-story brick factory like appearance was consistent with the uniform educational process that characterized both urban and rural education.

In the 1940s classrooms were placed end to end with long hallways on one side and an abundance of glass brick on the other, discouraging the use of the newly heralded audiovisual teaching techniques. The most recent era of construction incorporates large open spaces, movable walls, and carpeting (sold to the public as acoustical floor covering) to accommodate open education and flexible scheduling, which education innovators have been promoting as the education of the future. Urban schools of any given era look the same; rural schools are just smaller versions of “what’s best.”

The curriculum of rural education, with the possible exception of vocational agriculture and vocational home economics, is also a carbon copy of the larger school systems—or at least as much of a carbon copy as can be provided with limited staff and limited resources. The same textbooks used in urban schools are found in-rural areas. The accepted standards of excellence created by state education agencies and regional accrediting agencies are the same in rural areas, including teacher certification standards, number of course offerings (measured in Carnegie units or equivalent timework measures), number of volumes in the library, and dollars spent per student. By almost any of these urban measures, rural schools come out looking second best. Analysis of data on whether or not they turn out a less well-educated adult is as yet inconclusive.

The teaching staff of small rural schools is generally a mix of long-ten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1 Rural Education in America: Some Background
• Part 2 A Montage of Rural Education Improvement Efforts
• Part 3 Interpreting the Montage
• List of Contributors
• Index