The coming vitality of rural places

ABSTRACTIn many parts of the world, whether “developing” or “developed,” the concept of a rural sort of education is largely ignored by national ministries. The United States is just one notable example of silence at the bureaucratic center, despite scholarly interest in provincial universities. The future may change the “terms of engagement,” however, and this essay considers the leadership of rural schools and communities from the vantage of the daunting, but clearly visible, challenges of the future. The challenges described in the essay relate to a variety of visible, perhaps even familiar, economic, environmental, political, and cultural threats confronting life in the coming century. Though increasingly important and relevant to education, these threats are not a common part of discussions in education policy. The essay explains why, and why the threats are important to rural villages and districts. Discussion concludes with five rurally appropriate shifts of thinking that might help rural citizens and subjects around the world engage the challenges and counter the threats

Small schools and the pressure to consolidate.

Positioned in relationship to reform literature calling for small schools “by design” and interpreting data from a case study of a high performing but low-SES district in a Midwestern state, this paper provides a basis for making sense of the apparent divergence in policies governing schooling structures in rural and urban places. Its interpretation examines the way educational reformers work to valorize a multidimensional set of practices constituting “small school reform.” This reform package is, ironically, to some extent unrelated to what is actually taking place naturally in small schools and districts, where more “traditional” practices are said to be more common. Reformers often regard such practices as deficient, but that judgment seems to disregard empirical findings about school and district size, which typically show that smaller scale itself confers advantages across locales. Moreover, they overlook dynamics such as those revealed in this case study, which demonstrate how smaller scale promotes a close-knit family atmosphere as well as shared commitment to a set of core values. In addition, with smaller scale come structural arrangements that support an ethos of self-sufficiency and openness to “outsiders”—transient as well as open-enrollment students. These dynamics enable a small district to weather substantial threats to its existence

The Matthew Principle

This study extends and interprets a regression technique used to examine the possible role that socioeconomic status may have in regulating the effects of school and district size on student achievement. The original study (Friedkin Necochea, 1988), with data from California, confirmed an interaction between size and SES such that large schools benefitted affluent students, whereas small schools benefitted impoverished students. This replication applies the model to a very different state, West Virginia. Results are similar, except that the pattern of effects is shown to derive in part from the fact that in West Virginia impoverished students were shown actually to attend small schools in 1990. Small schools are shown to disrupt the usual negative relationship between socioeconomic status and student achievement. These results would be cause for celebration except that since 1988 West Virginia has, under a successful consolidation scheme facilitated by the state, closed nearly 20 percent of its schools, most of them small schools that had served rural communities in this mostly rural state. The discussion interprets findings with respect to this context and interprets the practical significance of studying structural variables such as those used in the study

Special Education Paraprofessionals in District Context

This survey research investigated the experience of Ohio districts using paraprofessionals assigned to special education students. This study provides a unique statewide description of district experience. Based on themes from the literature and preliminary conversations with educational practitioners in Ohio, the survey conceptualized district experience in five domains: role definition, assignment, supervision, training, and pay. Survey respondents (n = 184) included district superintendents and staff from Educational Service Centers and State Support Teams. Findings, overall, suggest that districts confront challenges in even defining the role of paraprofessional, and that assignment, supervision, and training are often haphazard in Ohio districts; furthermore, that wages are low. These findings suggest that district leadership in Ohio typically pays little attention to the use of special education paraprofessionals. Recommendations are included for research and district-level practice

Fairness, Voice, Dialogue: Measuring Collective Social Justice in Schools

The United States is an inequitable society growing more inequitable in recent decades, and schooling is both part mechanism of oppression and part pathway toward social justice. Improving the extent to which schooling actually contributes to equity, however, depends on efforts to cultivate educator practices that advance social justice. Defining these practices and measuring their use among school faculties are necessary parts of the improvement process. Unfortunately, adequate measures of collective social justice practice in schools have not been developed for use with teachers. Based on a conception of social just as a three-part structure, we report progress on developing a 22-item instrument to measure collective social justice practice in schools, using data from teachers about their schools (rather than about their own practice). This report explains the rationale and conceptualization of the instrument, argues its intended use and its validity relevant to the intended use, accounts for item development, and presents empirical evidence of the relationship of items to the construct and of the construct to contextual variables. We argue an intended use in the summative evaluation of professional development that aims to foster improvement in collective social justice practice in multiple schools. Empirical work (exploratory factor analysis and correlation) supported the theoretical model and showed that the proposed measure is unrelated to political orientation. Although additional validation studies are certainly necessary more fully to establish validity for the intended use, the considerable work thus far completed on the items should prove helpful to other researchers struggling to measure social justice practice in schools in an historic era of increased concern for equity

Two Book Reviews

This issue of the Education Policy Analysis Archives comprises two book reviews: An essay review of R. G. Brown Schools of Thought by Craig Howley and Aimee Howley, and a review of Ernest R. House, Professional Evaluation by Kent P. Scribner

Inclusive Instructional Leadership: A Quasi-Experimental Study of a Professional Development Program for Principals

This quasi-experiment tested whether or not a statewide professional development program for principals yielded measurable changes in self-reported attitudes and practices. The two-year program combined training events at central and regional locations with on-site coaching. The program attempted (1) to change attitudes toward inclusion, broadly understood and grounded in social justice, and (2) to cultivate practices constituting inclusive instructional leadership. The program positions the practices as efforts to serve all students well (i.e., including students of color, English Language Learners, and students with disabilities). This quasi-experiment used a post-only nonequivalent group design with propensity score matching to equate treatment and control groups. Dependent measures were principals’ attitudes towards inclusion and self-reported use of inclusive instructional leadership practices. Treatment group members included 56 participating principals; control group members were 56 non-participating principals matched (one-to-one matching) via the R optimal match routine. Comparison of attitude scores exhibited a statistically significant effect favoring the treatment group (ES=0.47). Also observed was a statistically significant effect (ES=.38) for one of the nine practice items—principals’ work with teachers on collaborative problem solving and professional learning. None of the observed values for the 21 items (i.e., across both scales, attitudes and practices) favored the control group

NEPC Review: A New Frontier: Utilizing Charter Schooling to Strengthen Rural Education

Bellwether Education Partners published A New Frontier: Utilizing Charter Schooling to Strengthen Rural Education in 2014. According to the publication, nine of the nation’s 10 most rurally populated states have no charter schools (in 8 of the 9, they are not permitted); a major purpose of the document is to argue for expanding charter schools into these states. While it is presented in a fashion similar to scholarly research, serious omissions and distortions make New Frontier little more than a political lobbying document targeting rural regions (even the most urbanized states have rural regions). Especially problematic are the inadequate support or explanation for New Frontier’s premises and its presentation of superficial and misleading use of research, particularly rural education research. In the end, it is little more than an advocacy document with premises that predetermine its recommendations: how to establish more charter schools in rural regions. Missing research and slanted representations render the document useless as a source of objective information. New Frontier is propaganda—neither a thoughtful inquiry nor an honest report

Studying the Rural in Education

This essay maintains that nation-building, partly through systems of schooling, has served rather more to debase than improve the rural circumstance. It suggests that a different logic of improvement is needed in rural education, but refrains from prescriptions. Instead, it focuses its attention on the sort of questions that researchers (and school improvers, for that matter) might ask to discover or invent that logic variously. It draws a distinction between cosmopolitan and local interests and provides examples of issues that exhibit the distinction. Finally, it suggests and provides hypertext links to sources in sociology, literature, philosophy, and education that might help educational researchers (and anyone else with an interest in "the rural") ground their studies and their actions in issues that honor rural interests. I remind readers that the very word "essay" means "tentative."</jats:p

High School Size, Achievement Equity, and Cost

The past decade has occasioned a dramatic increase in research on relationships between school size and a variety of outcomes, including measured achievement, high school completion rates, and postsecondary enrollment rates. An interesting interaction effect which has been found in replications across seven very different states is that as school size increases, the "achievement test score costs" associated with the proportion of economically disadvantaged students enrolled in a school also increase. In short, as schools get larger, average achievement among schools enrolling larger proportions of low socioeconomic-status students suffers. A traditional argument against smaller schools, however, is that they are simpl