Local schools are vitally important to the self-image of many rural communities, but these schools often become the ground for last-ditch battles between the “locals” and the “experts.” What are the benefits and the drawbacks of local control?
From a professional educator’s point of view, the Clinch school has no reason to exist. Tucked away in a beautiful mountain valley in Hawkins County, Tennessee, this 161-pupil, 12-grade school has only its setting to commend it. Elementary students in Clinch score well below the national average in reading; the high school students have trouble passing the Tennessee basic skills proficiency tests required for graduation. The facilities are dreadful; the WPA-vintage brick building is in severe disrepair, with broken windows and dirty, flaking classroom walls. The curriculum is drastically limited; only one science course is offered, and Algebra I is the most advanced math course available. Teachers do not flock to Clinch. In fact, it has the reputation of being the professional dumping ground of Hawkins County.
Twenty-eight miles away, down the twisting mountain road that most Clinch residents travel daily to work, is Rogersville, the county seat. Rogersville is the home of Cherokee High School, a spanking new building on a 70-acre campus, beautifully appointed from the greenhouse windows in the foyer to the 400-seat theater and the well-equipped science labs. Clinch children are welcome to enroll at Cherokee without additional charge, since both schools are part of the same county school system. Cherokee has plenty of room and offers plenty of options to the children of Clinch. But, of the 50 high school students in Clinch Valley, only the five who consider themselves college-bound go “over the mountain” to Rogersville.
Not only do the parents of Clinch Valley prefer their own school, but they have been willing to declare political war to protect it. The continuing existence of the Clinch school is the result of a hard fought battle waged by the residents against the county school board. The threatened closing of the Clinch school brought together valley natives and newcomers (groups that normally regard each other at best with mild skepticism) in an impressive show of solidarity on behalf of this underequipped, understaffed little mountain school.
Why? There are no tax dollars to be saved, since Clinch is part of a centrally funded county system. Indeed, the argument has been made that the per-pupil costs (and thus the tax rate) would go down if the Clinch children went to school in Rogersville. And the education in Clinch is not especially lavish, as is the case in some rich rural resort communities where generous funding and small pupil populations combine to give students special resources and little competition for their use. There is not even a small-town business center that depends (or feels it depends) on the continuing existence of the school to keep the bank and the market from succumbing to pressures from the nearest shopping mall.
Of course, the people of Clinch are not callous parents, indifferent to the welfare of their children, nor are they simply stubborn mountain people unwilling to compromise — although there are people in Hawkins County who will make both of these accusations. There is another dynamic operating in Clinch — and in hundreds of other small rural communities across the U.S. Though rarely articulated, there is at work here a political ideology that stretches back to the roots of our national identity.
There is a built-in tension in our political system — between the fundamental promise of local control and the reality of a national culture.
To understand what lies under the stubborn surface of Clinch, we must look back at one of the political/philosophical debates about the fundamental structure of government that informed the early development of this nation. Thomas Jefferson and his allies envisioned an America in which political and economic stability was based on the political activities of small communities of yeoman farmers — neither squires nor peasants, but small-scale landowners who would benefit from (and would therefore perpetuate) the orderly structure they created. The bulk of political power would repose in the hands of their decentralized communities, rising from localities to the states. Only residual authority would devolve onto the federal government, which would take on burdens of a national order that were beyond the capacities or individual interests of local communities or states. Alexander Hamilton and his followers saw this conception as foolish romanticism. Instead, they placed their faith in a system run by an urban elite, an “aristocracy of character” that would take a transcendent view of politics and economics and use its power in the national interest. What authority remained could be administered by the states and communities in the service of narrower local needs.
The Jeffersonians won the initial battle, and the Constitution reflects a populist political philosophy. By the end of the 19th century, however, the nature of national economic and political development had shifted most power to the urban centers. Further, the influx of immigrants had shifted the philosophical balance as well. National leaders, who might have been willing to give power to small communities dominated by men of Scotch English stock, were converted to a profound belief in centralized, expert-dominated government by the prospect of communities run by people born in southern or eastern Europe. In the end, Hamilton won the war. As a result, there is a built-in tension in our political system — a tension between the fundamental promise of local control and the overwhelming reality of a national culture and economy. This is the tension at work in Clinch.
In the early years of the Republic, educational development followed the pattern of Jeffersonian populism. No national ministry was established to oversee curriculum, to set graduation standards, or to run a national university. Instead, control over education was left to the states. In practice, this meant that virtually all educational policies were established by the town or county unit. Small, culturally homogeneous rural communities built and ran their own schools — hiring teachers, purchasing textbooks, and establishing school attendance patterns that harmonized with the cycles of local agriculture.
As the nation urbanized, however, and as immigrants became major educational consumers, these small schools came under attack from the proponents of centralized and standardized learning. Rural schools, which were adequate for children who could expect to live as their parents had, were harshly criticized by the newly minted educational experts who defined equal educational opportunity without reference to local control. They argued that a standard education must be offered to all children if they were all to be equally able to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by the urban centers. State regulatory agencies entrusted with creating a uniform system of education gradually took over practical authority from local communities — authority over teacher certification, over building standards, over curriculum content, and, in some places, over graduation requirements. Bit by bit, the rights of lay school boards, whose primary responsibility had always been to act in the local interest, gave way to the rights of educational experts, who based their claims on scientific knowledge of learning and on an overarching concern for national educational needs.
Today, this transfer of power is nearly complete. Local school boards continue to exist, but their actual power is restricted by federal law and federal funding policies, by state regulation, and by the moral and statutory power of the superintendent’s office. In much of the U.S., school boards spend most of their time trying to figure out how to comply with expensive (and sometimes conflicting) external regulations, their genuine authority restricted to approving bus contracts and reviewing roofing bids. An elected seat on such a board is often little more than an honorific position. Little significant policy is made.
For most of the country, this is fine. One result of the specialization of modern America has been a decline in the number of issues on which people feel they can make adequate judgments. Laypeople do not feel that they have the time, the knowledge, or the authority to make decisions about the education of their children. They feel that it is appropriate to leave such decisions to the experts, just as they leave decisions about fire-fighting equipment and public transportation largely to experts in those fields. For the bulk of the population, urbanized, centralized, systematic, standardized, and expert-dominated schooling is wholly consistent with the rest of their lives.
But not everywhere. If Jefferson’s yeoman farmer democracy has become merely a quaint model in the history books for most Americans, it is still alive in the minds of today’s version of the yeoman farmers. Scattered across the country are small, generally homogeneous communities that still try to run their political lives as though the United States were not a massive nation-state with a single, centralized culture, fostered by a common kind of schooling and cemented by universal access to the monolithic messages of television and McDonald’s. In the lives of these rural citizens, the tension between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian political philosophies still has daily force.
Schooling is often a tinderbox, partly because it involves children and partly because many small communities consider local schooling to be the last area over which they have a prayer of maintaining control.
Not all the efforts to maintain local authority manifest themselves as power struggles, and not all of them revolve around the schools. There are states (mostly in the Great Plains) in which the notion of nonintervention in local affairs is still the political norm. There are localities in which school issues have been resolved to the general satisfaction of the public, but the questions of standards for police protection or reductions in post office service have become the focus of heated debate. However, schooling is often a tinderbox, partly because it involves children and partly because many small communities consider local schooling to be the last area over which they have a prayer of maintaining control.
Children — hostages to fortune that they are — always provide a rallying point for parent protest, but in rural America these protests are enriched (or exacerbated) by nonparents. Small rural communities see the local school as the font of their continuing existence. The relationships and loyalties formed in the school are expected to yield dividends in the form of a new generation of local citizens who will support the values that keep the community alive. This is especially true of stagnating or declining rural areas, but even in growing communities the school is seen as the primary vehicle by which local values are transmitted to future local citizens.
Furthermore, the rural citizenry as a whole frequently sees the school as the center of daily community life, regardless of whose children are enrolled in school at the moment. As a citizen of tiny Elk River, Idaho (84 pupils, K-12), put it, “This town is built around that school and all that goes on there. . . . It’s our entertainment for the winter. It’s . . . every thing.”1 In part, this dependence may be due to a lack of alternative activities. It certainly tends to be strongest in the most isolated areas, where there is no competition from drive-ins or discos. But school life seems to have a function that goes beyond mere entertainment. Attending a varsity athletic event or a school play is an affirmation of membership in the community, a statement of the relationship between the individual and the place, which confirms important ties.
Given the importance of the school to the self-image of many rural communities, it should not be surprising that education has become the ground for last-ditch battles between the “locals” and the “experts.” The apparent subjects of the battles are often niggling. The Iowa Department of Public Instruction, for example, spent years trying to enforce a regulation that required even tiny high schools to offer two years of a foreign language, although often no students wanted to enroll and no college to which anyone from the community applied ever required a foreign language. The major problem is not the content of the conflict but the ideological structure in which the conflict takes place. Both locals and experts profess that the central problem is one of educational quality, though in most cases the real issue is educational control.
In many cases the issues of control and quality are intertwined. Sometimes, differences of opinion about what constitutes “good quality” involve trade-offs among competing, but legitimate, values. In Amana, Iowa (262 pupils, K-12), for example, the community is divided on the question of whether to consolidate with one of several other school districts. Some members of the community agree with the department of public instruction that a larger student body is needed to provide sufficient teacher specialization, student differentiation, and competition among the children (competition tends to be perceived as a desirable academic quality in Iowa). Others feel that the strong social and religious traditions of the Amana Society, now an integral part of the school curriculum, will be lost if the district consolidates and that the integrity of the community will be harmed. Those who wish to keep the small school argue that Amana children perform well above the national average on achievement tests, that the school transmits a unique culture, and that a sense of “oneness” would be lost if the district merged with any of its neighbors. Both sides have clear and reasonable positions, stemming from differing sets of educational priorities. Fortunately, Amana is a prosperous district whose children have many options. Therefore, no matter which side wins, it seems unlikely that the children of Amana — at least as individuals — will lose.
Elsewhere, the educational issues are less clear. In Potter Valley, California, the local citizens fought for several years to separate themselves from the larger district centered in Ukiah, 15 miles away. At an enormous expense of time, money, and effort, parents established the private Potter Valley Community High School as an alternative to sending their children to Ukiah. High-powered citizens — a retired rancher from Orange County, California, who, several years earlier, had sold his land to Disneyland for a tidy sum; the former chief speechwriter for Wilson Riles, state superintendent of schools; a couple from Los Angeles who ran a successful advertising agency in Ukiah — planned strategies for disentangling Potter Valley from the larger district. With the leadership and expertise of newcomers such as these, Potter Valley won.
But what did it win? Today, the school in Potter Valley is small, but thoroughly conventional. It is difficult to distinguish it, academically, from the high school in Ukiah, except that it offers students fewer options. Students like the friendly atmosphere; faculty like their curricular independence. However, to the outside observer, there is nothing about the educational quality of the school that makes it seem worth the fight.
The point is, of course, that Potter Valley residents chose their conventional curriculum, rather than having it chosen for them. In the interplay between educational quality and educational control, control is clearly the dominant issue here. Is choice alone sufficient reason to perpetuate local control? That is not an easy question to answer, especially when the choice is not the conventionality of Potter Valley but the pathetic limitations of Clinch.
The arguments against applying a Jeffersonian brand of populism to the operation of small rural school districts are multiple and persuasive. We are a national culture, and it is important that our children be prepared to cope with life in contexts larger than their hometowns. We are — or so we say — dedicated to educational equality, which suggests that Clinch children deserve the same options as the children of Rogersville and that children in rich districts do not deserve significantly more options than children in poor districts.
Finally, there is the issue of pure academic quality. It is, after all, the primary function of the school to provide adequate academic and vocational programs, and the small rural school cannot provide the options available in a larger school. Even if money is no object, it is difficult to make one- or two-pupil classes stimulating (as teachers in the tiny high schools in Alaska will attest). Further, the persistence of local control in small rural communities often interferes with the establishment of curricular and organizational standards. Parents and school board members in rural communities can keep a close watch on curriculum choices, and frequently they feel that they must challenge the teachers and the school administration on, behalf of local values. In Custer County, Montana, this means that some teachers have been forbidden to embark on creative curriculum projects by boards that do not want federal grant money coming into their districts. In Arnold, Nebraska, this means that school board members and Parent/Teacher Association members were able to force the school to devote a weekly assembly to a quasi-evangelical crusade against drug and alcohol use — even though there is little evidence that such a use of school time is likely to be effective. In general, the Jeffersonian legacy in small school districts means that important curricular decisions are often made with an eye to local (and generally conservative) biases and interests, rather than to the (generally broader) views of experts. As a result, rural children are less likely than their urban counterparts to be exposed to the newest curricula, to innovative practices, or to the latest results of educational research.
In the face of these arguments, many educators and legislators find it difficult to see any reason to continue small rural schools or small school districts, except where extreme isolation requires them. But there are reasons to maintain these pockets of independence, and educational leaders need to understand those reasons well.
First, the bulk of small rural schools meet the needs of their constituencies reasonably well. Rural people speak with pride about the family feeling that exists in their schools, about the individual attention to children’s needs, about the commitment of community resources and people to the educational enterprise. Despite a national feeling of distress about the quality of public schooling, a survey of teachers, administrators, and school board members in America’s smallest rural districts shows an extraordinary level of satisfaction with these little schools. About 75% of the respondents expressed contentment with factors ranging from student achievement to drug and alcohol control to teacher quality.2 Such a high level of satisfaction would be hard to come by in the cities or suburbs.
Rural children are less likely than their urban counterparts to be exposed to the newest curricula, to innovative practices, or to the latest research.
Second, the practical victory of the Hamiltonian political structure does not destroy the Jeffersonian basis of the Constitution. Although it is currently fashionable to cast educational discussions in terms of economic utility and political feasibility, we must still remember that we are supposed to be a nation of citizens and that local control of important social institutions is part of our conception of citizenship. If the nature of life in the cities and suburbs has changed, so that citizens choose to place their trust in experts and specialists, that is their right. But it should also be the right of rural citizens to maintain a way of life that depends primarily on local values and on the skills of generalists.
Finally, for those who are unmoved by philosophical considerations, important economic and political problems would stem from the demise of locally controlled rural education. These are not theoretical problems, but actual dilemmas faced by governments from Scotland to Nigeria that seek to maintain a modern nation state while preventing an imbalance in the distribution of the population between urban and rural areas.
The relationships among these apparently disparate factors require some explanation. The creation of a modern nation requires a process that political sociologists call “center formation,” the establishment of “a center claiming sovereignty over a territory.”3 New nations may have only a few centers; developed countries are likely to have many. The process of center formation makes it possible to establish a centralized political, economic, and cultural structure that benefits the nation as a whole.
The educational system is frequently used as a means of establishing the primacy of the center. At the lower levels, education is used as a means of inculcating the cultural norms, the political ideology, and the economic expectations of a national society. At the higher levels, the educational system is used as a means of selecting and certifying a national elite who will, in turn, control the national structure. In other words, the urban political center becomes the center of the society’s reward structure as well. And those who seek access to those rewards must go to the center.
Center formation may be a necessary step toward modern nationhood, but, like most political practices, it has its costs.4 As long as the reward structure is concentrated solely in the centers, the movement of population will be in only one direction. Those with ambition and talent are rarely repelled by the promise of achieving elite status, and they will tend to gravitate toward the urban centers. Thus, generation after generation, the countryside loses many of its strongest residents to the city.
It may be more important to rural people to have their own school than to have what they and the experts would agree is “better quality” education.
This may be fine for the individuals who migrate to the cities, and in the short run it is certainly fine for the cities themselves. The ultimate strength of a nation, however, depends in part on the continuing strength of its rural areas. When the population moves only from the country to the cities, the cities quickly become overcrowded, the job market glutted. Furthermore, urban areas depend on the countryside to provide the raw materials that support both life and industry. In the undeveloped countries, the bulk of the population must work at food production. But even in the U.S., balance must be maintained between urban and rural populations, so that control of food and raw materials does not concentrate in the hands of so few producers that the national welfare is jeopardized.
The problem of urban/rural imbalance has become sufficiently urgent in some countries that national leaders have decided to try to keep rural people at home. Again, the schools have often been used as instruments of social policy. For example, Norway has instituted the “locally relevant curriculum,” intended to make rural customs and occupations part of the basic educational structure. Finland offers teachers substantial financial incentives to leave Helsinki — where the bulk of the population lives — and to work in rural schools. In the 1970s Tanzania launched a national experiment in “practical education,” intended to teach modern agricultural techniques to small farmers and thus stem the tide of migration to Dar es Salaam. There are a dozen variations on this theme.
Unfortunately, as Roy Nash points out in Schooling in Rural Societies, these programs rarely have their intended effects. As long as the programs planned to enhance rural stability are created, funded, and controlled by central ministries, their built-in contradictions will destroy them. Rural people can see that the reward system continues to favor the urban centers. They know that admission to the national universities and participation in the national culture continue to be the route to success. Nash says that the Tanzanian program failed, not because it did not teach agricultural skills adequately, but because “parents saw the school entirely as a means of access to urban employment, and . . . teachers . . . saw their purpose as being to provide opportunities for personal advancement for their bright scholars.”‘5 The teachers quite accurately perceived that the “opportunities” were passed out by the urban secondary schools. “Special” rural programs that make rural people little more than an externally controlled peasantry will not maintain the rural/urban balance, no matter how “locally relevant” they are purported to be.
This does not mean that imbalance is inevitable, even in highly urban societies. If certain portions of the power structure are decentralized and the control over important aspects of community life is left in the hands of the rural community, the sense that all reward emanates from the urban centers can be reduced. The messages of the national culture will not be ignored in rural America. The interstate highway system and the mass media insure that national cultural values are transmitted to all citizens. In addition, rural schools buy textbooks from national publishers and conform (more or less) to state and federal regulations. The question in Arnold, in Amana, and in Clinch is not whether America’s priorities will be part of a local education but whether any local priorities will be represented.
Far from being destructive, our traditional conflict between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian perspectives makes it possible for us to avoid a permanent imbalance between centrist imperatives and the need to maintain rural strength. We are blessed with the possibility of maintaining a healthy tension between the two. The pressure toward centralization remains, as does the capacity of the national system of higher education to allocate status and to shape the culture. However, rural people tend to identify more strongly with local values and traditions than with national structures.6 Thus a high degree of local control over local institutions helps to mitigate the sense that the goodies are being passed out elsewhere. Unlike Finland and Tanzania, where elaborate government programs have failed to turn the tide of migration, the U.S. has seen a voluntary reversal in migration patterns. More people are moving from the cities to the countryside now than at anytime in the last 100 years. Many of them are searching for a Jeffersonian sense of community control that they have not found in the cities. If the U.S. wants to encourage this modest but healthy trend, it should strive to maintain that sense of local autonomy.
It may be more important to the people of Clinch to have their own school than to have what they and the experts would agree is “‘better quality” education. The residents of Clinch know that most of their children will work in the factories of Rogersville, no matter what kind of schooling they have. Given that outcome, it may be quite reasonable to decide to keep a school — even a decrepit school — in which Clinch children are not considered “hicks,” a school in which every one understands that transplanting tobacco seedlings is more important than a day or two of classes. We might well ask why the school in Clinch should have so little, when the school in Rogersville has so much. But we run a serious risk when we begin to ask whether the citizens of Clinch have a right to decide whether their school should cease to exist.
- Thomas Gjelten, “Elk River, Idaho: The Pursuit of Quality Schooling in a Threatened Community,” in Paul M. Nachtigal, ed., Rural Education: In Search of a Better Way (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982).
- Faith Dunne and William S. Carlsen, “Small Rural Schools in the United States: A Statistical Profile,” unpublished paper, Small Schools Project, Department of Education, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., 1981.
- John W. Meyer and Richard Rubinson, “Educational and Political Development,” in Fred N. Kerlinger, ed., Review of Research in Education (Itasca, Ill.: Peacock, 1975).
- Even Jefferson, devoted as he was to decentralization of political power, participated in center formation as President, and he promoted the use of the educational system to create and maintain a coherent American culture, informed by a uniform political ideology. This apparent contradiction in Jefferson’s own actions reveals the tension between national imperatives and local rights that has dogged the policies of the most ardent populists. In nations that lack a populist tradition, the nationalization of education has always seemed a natural way to insure the sovereignty of the center.
- Roy Nash, Schooling in Rural Societies (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 133.
- R. E. Pahl, “The Rural-Urban Continuum,” Sociologia Ruralis, vol. 6, 1966.
Note: The research on which this article is based was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Education, #NJE-G-79-0166.
This article appears in the December 1983 issue of Kappan, Vol. 65, No. 4, pp. 252-256.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Faith Dunne
FAITH DUNNE is an associate professor of education at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.
