Rural Matters

Sometimes it seems to me that we live in a time with a prevailing ethic of I’ve-got-mine-you-take-care-of-your-own. Maybe it’s always been this way.

I was reflecting on this several weeks ago while I listened to yet another radio report of a wounded volunteer soldier back from Iraq whose family is losing almost everything as a result of his (in this case) service in the military. Do we have any sense of what we owe each other, I wondered, any sense of how we benefit from each other?

Later that day I began making calls to people in rural Arkansas for a story for Rural Policy Matters about ACRE, Advocates for Community and Rural Education. I talked to about eight people, mostly parents and community residents, including people who do not have kids in school but who nonetheless care.

I opened with a pretty general set of questions: tell me about ACRE and why you are a part of it.

The responses were a powerful antidote to what I heard on the radio.

Continue reading "Sharing Responsibility for Our Kids and Our Communities" »

Posted by Robin Lambert at 09:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Status of Education in Rural America, a new report from the National Center on Education Statistics (NCES) has some pretty interesting information about rural schools.

For example, rural students face more challenges related to college access and participation than students in any other locale. High-poverty rural schools spend LESS per pupil than high-poverty urban schools and less than most other rural schools.

And, "remote" rural schools -- those that are more than 35 miles from a city and more than 10 miles from a town -- have higher rates of poverty than many urban schools. In fact, African American and American Indian/Native Alaskan students who attend remote rural schools are more likely to attend a high poverty school than are their peers in cities.

Despite these challenges, remote rural schools have higher averaged freshman graduation rates than all other locales except suburbs, which they equal.

But you wouldn’t learn this information from most news reports. Those tend to focus on how rural is "in the middle," doing better on most indicators than cities and not as well as suburbs.

That's because news coverage has focused mainly on the rural "averages" highlighted in the report's own summary.

The reality, however, is that “rural” is highly variable. Rural places differ from one another more dramatically and on more dimensions than most suburbs or cities.

Some rural schools in affluent communities have plenty of resources, long histories of public support, and lots of opportunity. In short, they skew up the rural averages.

On the other hand, there are hundreds of struggling rural districts that face poverty rates as high or higher than most of the nation’s poorest urban districts (see "The 'Rural 800' Districts"), and many have long-standing histories of political and social struggle. Yet these poor rural districts have even fewer financial and municipal resources than districts in most large cities, and they get less attention.

When indicators for the best-resourced rural schools are averaged with those for the most challenged schools, the result reveals little about either school setting. And the averages divert attention from real needs. And from real possibilities in rural schools, including struggling ones.

So what does the report have to say about rural schools that is revealing and important?

Continue reading "Rural Schools—Not So Much—In the Middle" »

Posted by Robin Lambert at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The oldest African American school known to still be standing in Virginia is being restored thanks to Frank Agnew, resident of Fieldale in Henry County.

Rock Run School was built in the 1880s by local African American residents; it educated students until the mid-1950s.

Agnew owns the building and plans to make it available to community residents for local functions. He spends about 20-25 hours each week on the preservation effort and has raised more than $30,000 in donated labor and materials from the community in addition to a $10,000 grant from the Henry County Preservation Fund.

Agnew’s work, and especially the care he has taken to restore the building’s beauty, has been praised by local residents and public officials alike. Many local residents are also thrilled that this important community landmark will again be a functional gathering place.

The building serves as an important landmark beyond the community as well. Thousands of similar schools were built by African Americans after the Civil War. (It’s a myth that most such schools were established by white missionaries or philanthropists; in truth, missionaries generally arrived to find that African American residents had already established schools in their communities, and philanthropists usually supplemented community-based efforts.)

Many of these schools were left to crumble in the 1950s and 1960s when most Southern counties built new, usually consolidated, schools for African Americans in an attempt to demonstrate that they provided equal educational opportunities in segregated schools. These efforts also tended to centralize authority and strip communities of much of their influence over schools.

Rock Run School is also recognized as an important architectural landmark. At several different times the community built additions to the original building in order to accommodate expanding functions and additional grades. Each addition has been recognized as example of best construction practices of its historical period.

You can see a photo and read more about Frank Agnew and the Rock Run School in the Martinsville Bulletin.

Posted by Robin Lambert at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Check out yesterday's post on the Daily Yonder for an interesting comparison of the effects of flooding and the combination of low funding and high stakes testing demands on schools in many rural communities.

The author, Richard Oswald, lives in Atchison County, Missouri, where the Missouri River flooded earlier this summer. He's also a former school superintendent. So, he's got some first-hand references that draw a vivid picture of what's happening to many rural schools, especially those located in communities with "quick stop" economies.

While at DailyYonder, take a look at "Saving Greensburg..." Governor Kathleen Sibelius has said that re-opening the high school is key to saving this small Kansas town that was destroyed by a tornado in May.

Posted by Robin Lambert at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In an earlier post , we asked a question about how rural schools have addressed housing needs as a way to recruit and retain teachers. Here’s the original question:

Our school has teacher retention problems due to many things, including lack of housing near the school. We are thinking about buying a house that we could rent out to new teachers and are wondering if this has been tried before and if it was successful.

We’ve received several examples of specific ideas that rural schools are using as well as additional ideas for addressing this vexing problem.

We thought these ideas deserved their own post, so we’ve listed them below (some are also in the comment section of the original post).

If you would like to contact the person who sent the idea, please email Rural Matters editor and we will help put you in contact with the person who submitted the idea.

Thanks to everyone who shared their knowledge. Please feel free to add to the discussion by adding a comment below.

SOLUTIONS TO RURAL TEACHER HOUSING DILEMMAS

NEW! September 4, 2007 FROM CALIFORNIA: There are schools that provide teacherages here in northern California. Kashia, a school of 14 students, has a teacherage. I believe the teacher pays a small amount of rent for it each month. There are other examples of this in isolated rural areas. In Zenia, CA there were two houses on the school property; one for the teacher and the other for the bus driver/maintenance person.

FROM MONTANA: In rural Eastern Montana small schools often have a “teacherage”, a small house near the school, or even on school property, that they offer as free housing in order to keep teachers. These rural schools are sometimes 50 miles from the nearest small town, so providing free housing is essential.

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FROM NEW MEXICO: In New Mexico, a rural school (Tatum Municipal Schools) established building construction classes for high school students, bought materials and had them build housing (for teachers, I think) owned by the district. They report good success with this.... Another New Mexico school who has been doing this for some time is Santa Fe High School...although not necessarily a rural school.

Continue reading "Solutions for Rural Teacher Housing Question" »

Posted by Robin Lambert at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rural Matters is asking readers to share what they know about an inquiry the blog received from a school in rural South Carolina. Here's the question:

Our school has teacher retention problems due to many things, including lack of housing near the school. We are thinking about buying a house that we could rent out to new teachers and are wondering if this has been tried before and if it was successful.

If you have knowledge of innovative ways in which rural communities have tried to address housing shortages for new teachers, please share your information here on Rural Matters by clicking "Comment" below and following the instructions. Your information will be included in the comment section of this post.

If you prefer, you can send your information as an email directly to the editor and it will be passed along to the South Carolina school.

We'll keep this post and any comments on Rural Matters, of course, and will feature unusual or particularly interesting ideas on the main page of the blog.

For more background on the problem of housing for rural teachers and some solutions that schools have tried historically, continue reading...

Continue reading "Housing Shortages for New Teachers--A Question for Readers" »

Posted by Robin Lambert at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A new study by the Rural Trust finds that students who attend consolidated rural high schools face longer bus rides and are less likely to participate in extra-curricular activities because of the challenge of transportation.

The study, Slow Motion: Traveling by School Bus in Consolidated Districts in West Virginia, examined surveys of high school students in four West Virginia counties. In two counties, high schools are consolidated, and in two counties, high schools are smaller and located in or near the communities where more students live.

The investigators found that bus rides in districts with consolidated high schools are 43% longer than in districts that have not consolidated their schools. In the consolidated counties, high school students who ride the bus lose an average of 49 minutes each day, compared to students ho have other forms of transportation in those same districts.

Continue reading "Slow Motion" »

Posted by Robin Lambert at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Two small rural high schools in Union County, South Carolina are likely in their last year of existence, as soon as a recent school board decision to consolidate becomes final. Even though over 700 Jonesville High and Lockhart School supporters jammed into public meetings to plead for their schools – especially notable because Lockhart has 120 students and Jonesville has 240 – the board voted 7-2 to consolidate the schools into Union High School, which has 1000 students. The two smaller schools lived under threat of consolidation for years, and successfully fought off efforts to close them until just these last few weeks. How did this happen?

Continue reading "Consolidation in One South Carolina District: More Dollars = Less Sense?" »

Posted by Amanda Adler at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Low-wealth school districts, especially those that are also small, often have Sophie’s choices forced upon them. They’re required to sacrifice educationally some of their students as the price for supposedly buying opportunities for others.

To be sure, lots of students fall through the cracks in all kinds of schools. And in some schools those cracks are widened into chasms by poverty, abuse, and the low expectations, disregard, and hostility that accompany the various –isms. Even as thousands of educators and parents and communities and students struggle daily against the circumstance and bad policy that opened the chasms, we haven’t summoned the collective will or wisdom to address the underlying causes.

This is a challenging mix for schools. Add to it insufficient funding, prescriptive curriculum requirements, and policies like minimum school or district enrollment and small, low-wealth districts are forced to make deliberate choices that harm kids.

Here’s how it tends to work; districts are increasingly required to offer a range of classes, usually advanced ones, so those kids who want to go to college have the “advantages” of kids in wealthy districts with lots of curriculum options. When small under-funded districts don’t have the resources to offer all those classes, the “solution” forced on them is to close them and send their students long distances to larger schools in other communities.

One of the problems with this fix is that it in order to see that a few kids get calculus or a third year of foreign language or journalism, for example, a few more kids don’t go to school any more at all, and a few more don’t take any challenging classes. A so-called solution for some kids is a disaster for others.

Continue reading "College Board Could Help or Harm Rural Students" »

Posted by Robin Lambert at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When small rural communities close (or lose) their school it’s equivalent to a major employer shutting down, AND it redirects local tax money to another town.

Those are major points in an interesting comment posted yesterday on the Consolidation/Small Schools Resource Page here on Rural Matters. You can read the comment here by scrolling down the page.

The fate of the community is one of the most common concerns of rural people when the school is threatened. And with good reason. Schools are often the only public institution in rural communities, the largest employer, and the single organization that touches almost everyone. The community’s tax dollars support it, and if it’s in its own district, the community governs it.

Continue reading "When Fighting for A Rural Community is Fighting For Rural Kids" »

Posted by Robin Lambert at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning, 450,000 schools buses, many running double routes, rounded up 25 million kids – over half of all public school students – and hauled them off to school, covering about 22 million miles along the way. That was today. And it will be the same tomorrow.

Over the course of the school year, these busses will travel a stunning 4 billion miles and eat up over $15 billion of public education dollars, about 8 percent of total current expenditures for K-12 schools.

Continue reading "What We Know and Don’t About Busing" »

Posted by Marty Strange at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Seems there are ever more kinds of small schools every day. In recent days we have noted schools that are “necessarily small,” “small by default,” “small by choice,” “small by design,” part of “small learning communities,” and “naturally small.”

It is worth noting that the proliferation of terms to describe schools that are not big parallels a growth in awareness that, in education, small works. Make no mistake, all these terms carry the political baggage of school finance battles in which various interests are trying to win a bigger piece of the pie, or keep others from getting a bigger piece of the pie, or making sure their kind of smallness and not someone else’s kind of smallness gets a bigger piece of the pie.

It’s time we had a glossary to sort out the political nuances of these terms. Here’s my offering. What’s yours?

Continue reading "The Many Meanings of “Small”" »

Posted by Marty Strange at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The state of Arkansas has for the last several years—and especially since the Supreme Court found the state school finance system unconstitutional—pursued aggressive policies to consolidate rural districts, and subsequently close small schools. Those policies are the subject of much contention in Arkansas. In the summer of 2006, the fight of the rural community of Paron to save its high school from closure became a flashpoint in the Arkansas debate over rural education.

But no matter where you live, if you care about honest reporting or rural kids or good education, it’s worth paying attention to what happened to Paron, especially in the press. That’s because what happened to Paron is a not just a travesty of justice, but an object lesson in the ways an irresponsible press does real harm to rural kids and their communities.

Continue reading "Why What Happened to Paron Matters, Even if You're Not From Arkansas" »

Posted by Robin Lambert at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Slapping kids around to keep them in order is a lot less unusual in schools than you might think. Corporal punishment – using physical force on kids to maintain discipline or enforce school rules – has been condemned by common sense and all kinds of scholarly research.

But it happens. A lot.

Take Florida, for example, one state that keeps score and posts the results on its website. It’s not a pretty picture, especially in small rural districts.

Continue reading "Corporal Punishment -- Still Legal in 22 States" »

Posted by Marty Strange at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The rural community of Paron, Arkansas has been the center of a media storm in that state for much of the summer. A rapid fire series of court actions re-opened, closed, re-opened, and then closed again Paron High School.

Several commentaries here on Rural Matters relate to how the state media in Arkansas covered the Paron story. Check out Facts Are Stubborn Things, Mr. Greenberg, Why Paron Matters, Even If You're Not From Arkansas, and Paron and the Propagandists.

In order to help our readers make sense of the Paron story and how it was covered, we’ve presented this news piece that summarizes events as they unfolded.

Continue reading "What Really Happened in Paron, Arkansas" »

Posted by Robin Lambert at 02:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Paul Greenberg’s been getting some mail. And he doesn’t like it.

The editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette said in a Sunday editorial (September 24, 2006) that he had been sent about a “zillion” copies of an article appearing on this Blog (“Facts are stubborn things, Mr. Greenberg,” posted September 8, 2006).

The article chided Greenberg for not leveling with Arkansans about the facts surrounding the closing of Paron High School. Paron High was forced to close after it was annexed by neighboring Bryant School District. The excuse Bryant gave for the closure was that Paron allegedly was unable to teach all of the 38 courses Arkansas high schools are required to teach each year.

Our article recited a pile of facts about the good performance of Paron students and about the circumstances surrounding the school’s efforts to teach journalism, one of the 38 required courses. Those facts were repeated by many writers who sent letters to the editor as well as emails to the Democrat-Gazette editorial page.

And Mr. Greenberg feels beleaguered and besieged by all this email. I doubt he got a zillion, but any number might have been a bit much for him.

He’s not used to seeing in print opinions he doesn’t agree with, unless he approves publishing them. As editorial

Continue reading "Paron and the Propagandist " »

Posted by Marty Strange at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"We are going to be able to take professional development where teachers are rather than simply asking them to come where we are. It also means we are using the latest tools and technology to give teachers the best tools of teaching an educational capacity."

Those are the words of Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in announcing a new on-line program offered by the state Department of Education so teachers can take a required 60 hours of professional development courses annually through distance learning programs.

That’s the same Department of Education that requires that all high schools actually teach 38 required courses every year, with a certified teacher on site, whether students sign up for the course or not.

Nope, courses taught by distance learning cannot meet this requirement. Even if the course comes from the high school’s home district. Or from the state’s virtual high school. Kids can take distance learning courses, but that won’t relieve their high school of having to teach the 38 required courses.

Continue reading "Goose and Gosling" »

Posted by Marty Strange at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Despite the fact that many states are pursuing the irrational policy of closing small schools in rural areas—even as many urban areas are scaling down the size of their schools—the research is clear that when socioeconomic factors are controlled, students in smaller schools fare better academically, are more likely to graduate, and participate in more numbers and kinds of extracurricular activities. The advantages are especially strong for at-risk students.

Now a new report from the Rural Trust, The Hobbit Effect: Why Small Works in Public Schools, explores the research that helps explain why smaller is better when it comes to schools.

The report identifies ten research-based attributes of small schools that are proven to have a positive impact on kids and their learning. These elements are either normally found in most small schools or are more common in smaller schools than in larger schools.

You can read this and other reports at the Rural Trust.

Posted by Robin Lambert at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Power and the Promise.

Distance learning is here to stay. Its future appears to be unsure only in its direction or extent of growth. This paper focuses on the applicability and potential of two-way interactive television (I-TV) for small and rural K-12 schools as a primary asset in improving educational access and equity and calls for the adoption of enlightened distance learning policies and guidelines at the state and local levels. Appendices include: (1) Characteristics of Major Distance Learning Technologies; (2) Types of Distance Learning Technologies; and (3) a Categorization of State Videoconferencing Policies. The Appendices are followed by a glossary of technical terms and list of references.

Posted by Robin Lambert at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This post is regularly updated to include new information related to consolidation and small schools. Check back often for additional materials and resources.

Small schools and small school districts frequently find themselves subject to consolidation attempts. Yet, research indicates that students perform better in smaller schools and districts, that smaller schools and districts are just as cost-effective as larger schools and districts in rural areas, and that schools and districts are essential parts of rural infrastructure and make important contributions to the economy and well-being of rural communities. There are also a number of alternatives to consolidation that make good sense educationally and fiscally.

If your schools or district is threatened with consolidation, there are a number of information resources available to help your community. Here is a partial listing to get you started:

NEW: Slow Motion: Traveling by School Bus in Consolidated Districts in West Virginia. This report from the Rural Trust finds that students who attend school in counties with consolidated high schools spend 43% more time on the bus than students who attend smaller, community-based high schools. Bus riders in consolidated counties lose 49 minutes a day compared to students in their own schools who have other forms of transportation. Students in consolidated schools were much less likely to participate in extracurricular activities. Such participation is closely linked to stronger academic engagement, higher grade point averages, and greater likelihood of graduating.

Consolidation Fight-Back Toolkit. This set of materials produced by the Rural Trust includes research references, information about alternatives to consolidation, and links to other resources.

Continue reading "Best Consolidation Resources" »

Posted by Robin Lambert at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)