Rural Matters

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?

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