Rural Matters

A few years ago reformers in a number of big American cities began calling for a return to the K-8 school. Such schools were once the norm in many rural and urban communities. But in the middle of the 20th century they began to be replaced by junior high schools, and later in many places by middle schools.

But K-8 schools continued to exist in many rural communities, where the financial and educational practicality of keeping more kids under one roof sometimes managed to trump ideological ascendancy. A few neighborhoods in some cities held on to the K-8 school as well.

As the battle between middle school and junior high advocates heated up, researchers began to look at the school structures (read here grade configurations) in which middle grade kids did best. What tended to come up in such investigations was that middle grade kids in K-8 schools were better off academically and socially than their peers in pre-teen-only schools—whether organized under the middle school “concept” or as junior highs.

Many rural educators weren’t surprised at the rationales for the better performance of young adolescents in K-8 schools: more academic continuity, more personal attention from teachers and other adults in the school who were better able to know the child over a longer period of time, generally smaller schools, less clique-ishness and social pressure, fewer disruptive transitions, and greater parental involvement.

Research on K-8 schools began to rise to the attention of reformers in a number of large urban systems who were concerned about the performance of middle schools and their students. In Baltimore, the city noted that 54% of sixth graders in its existing K-8 schools passed the state reading test, compared to only 36% in “traditional” middle schools.

It wasn’t long before a number of big cities—including New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Baltimore—were re-organizing at least some of their middle grade schools into K-8s.

And so the urban bandwagon of creating K-8 schools was out of the gate. Meanwhile, the closure of K-8 schools in rural areas seems to have continued apace.

Now, as happens in the dust of bandwagons, there’s concern. According to an article in the Baltimore Sun, many parents in that city charge that the new K-8 schools aren’t getting the funding and equipment they were promised and don’t get as much per pupil funding for their middle grade students as do the middle schools.

The Baltimore Sun also reports on a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University says that new K-8 schools in Philadelphia haven’t contributed to improved student learning there (although student achievement went up similarly overall in K-8 and middle schools). The report does not appear to be available at this time on the web, but it apparently calls for less attention to school structure and more attention to curriculum, high quality teachers, and meeting the needs of young adolescents.

Newspapers in a number of cities have picked up the article, so don’t be surprised if a “K-8’s don’t work” bandwagon starts rolling through your state.

What is pretty clear is that school structure does matter. See the education researcher Craig Howley’s interesting papers about grade configuration at his website by linking here and here.

The thing is that different communities need different structures. And rural communities—where distances are large and populations small—tend to need school structures that accommodate a wide range of grades. Indeed, many rural schools thrive as K-12 or preK-12—in one building, with middle grade kids thriving right along with everyone else.

K-12 public schools are extremely rare in urban areas. But there are signs that urban areas may be finding success with other grade configurations for middle grade kids. In New York City, some schools are doing well as K-8s while others are doing well as 6-12s. See this article in Sarasota's Herald Tribute for more information. Schools that are organized as 6-12s and 7-12s are also common in many rural areas.

One of the problems with bandwagon solutions is they tend to apply a single idea as a simple solution to a complex problem. Then when it doesn’t quite pan out, the whole approach is likely to be thrown out. This phenomenon could become a problem for K-8 schools.

In middle grades, of course, we need good teachers, strong curriculum, responsive programs, high expectations, parental involvement. The same things that are needed at every grade of schooling.

The question is how to insure these essential components are available to students no matter where they live. Resolving that question requires genuine involvement of parents and community residents, school boards who are close to the communities whose schools they govern, and the teachers and students who are affected by the decisions.

And that kind of involvement is much more likely to be knocked over by a runaway wagon than picked up by one.

Posted by Robin Lambert at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The 2003 National Teacher of the Year, Betsy Rogers, has struggled—sort of—at a struggling school. At least that’s part of the message in a report in the Christian Science Monitor last week.

The article and Ms. Rogers’ blog for Teacher Magazine explore some of the difficulties of working in and recruiting teachers for struggling schools.

After her year traveling and speaking as Teacher of the Year, Ms. Rogers returned to Jefferson County, Alabama. But instead of returning to her home school in Leeds, she made the commitment to go to Brighton School as the curriculum coordinator. Brighton is a small K-8 that had been on the state improvement list longer than any other in the school system.

READ ON AND SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON HOW TO SUPPORT STRUGGLING SCHOOLS.

Jefferson County is the county in which Birmingham is located. But Birmingham and many of its suburbs have separate city school systems. Jefferson County schools serve students in the remaining parts of the county—older industrial suburbs and coal camps, and the rural communities on the northern and western edges of the county.

Brighton is one of these communities. More than 90% of its students qualify for free and reduced lunch. Brighton was a K-12 school through 1989-90 when the county suddenly removed the high school. Brighton’s 45 or so 8th graders are split to attend two high schools.

In the CSM article and her blog, Ms. Rogers is surprisingly frank about the pressures and challenges of teaching in a struggling school. She mentions some of the ways the school and its students face discrimination in sponsored events for local schools, and she describes constant requirements to change teaching methods, hours of extra professional development work, near-obsessive attention to test scores, a revolving door of staff and consultants, stacks of paperwork, and sheer exhaustion for almost everyone on the staff. She says that on some days she could barely get out of bed. At the end of the year, Brighton had improved significantly, but still had a long way to go.

Part of what’s so interesting about these reflections is what is not said, the questions that are not asked about what it will take to staff and turn around the nation’s struggling schools.

The most glaring of this questions is this: if a teacher who’s earned the highest national acclaim, has more than 20 year experience, National Board Certification, and a doctorate can barely get out of bed on some days to go to her struggling school—one that’s receiving extra attention and support because of her presence as a high-profile Teacher of the Year, how are less talented, experienced, and committed teachers expected to make a difference for kids in schools that are getting a lot less attention and support? What does it take to create schools that work for kids and their communities in the most distressed places?

In her blog, Rogers notes that experienced teachers aren’t likely to pull up stakes and start over in a struggling school. She suggests that “grow your own” programs might be a necessary solution for schools that are hard to staff.

There are some other suggestions for improving struggling, hard-to-staff schools. But there’s no mention of how the school could draw on the community. (Oh, there are parenting classes—for which parents must pay—where school staff show videos and stress the importance of reading to children…) But the idea that the community, even one as poor as this one, has something to contribute to the well-being of the school and the children who attend it appears to be totally absent from the framework of improvement for this school.

In fact, Rogers suggests, indirectly, that for students to have opportunity they have to leave Brighton. It seems she is trying to get the 6th through 8th grades removed from the school. The stated rationale is that Brighton does not have sports teams, band, and honors classes.

There may be good reason for these kids to go to other schools. The Harvard Civil Rights Project has long produced research that suggests that students of color achieve at higher levels when they are not isolated in racially segregated schools. So perhaps Brighton’s middle grade kids would do better if they were split between the two nearest middle schools.

But until that conclusion could be reached, a number of questions need to be asked and answered. Here are a few: will sending these kids to other schools really improve their achievement or will it simply hide their struggles in a larger pool of kids? If student achievement goes up, what are the factors that make it improve? What is the impact on the community of closing the school—does it make the community economically more viable, better organized socially or does closing the school accelerate the economic and social troubles that underlie many of the students’ academic struggles? Is closing a hard-to-staff school an out for trying to recruit, train, support, and retain teachers for difficult places? How do community residents want to be involved in the school and what do they want to contribute? Why can't band and sports and strong classes be offered in this school?

Since there’s been little research that follows kids when their school is closed, it’s hard to know the answer to some of these these questions. But we should be asking them.

What are your answers to these questions, and to the most basic question: What should be done to improve struggling schools and support the students and staff who work in them?

Share your thoughts here on Rural Matters. Just click on the “comments” button below and type in your ideas.

Posted by Robin Lambert at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)