The Poor Little Rich District: The Effects of Suburbanization on a Rural School and Community.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Aimee Howley, Educational Studies Department, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701. (howley@ohio.edu) Citation: Howley, A. (with Carnes, M., Eldridge, A., Huber, D., Lado, L. M., Kotler, R., & Turner, M.). (2005, July 18). The poor little rich district: The effects of suburbanization on a rural school and community. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 20(9). Retrieved [date] from http://jrre.psu.edu/articles /20-9.pdf
Revisiting the Rural Superintendency: Rethinking Guiding Theories for Contemporary Practice
Sorber, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Center for the Future of Land-Grant Education, West Virginia University, 500 Allen Hall, Morgantown, WV 26506 (ecmchenrysorber@mail. wvu.edu). The Journal of Research in Rural Education is published by the Center on Rural Education and Communities, College of Education, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802. ISSN 1551-0670 Recent sociological research has highlighted myriad social and economic challenges that require rural superintendents to critique internal spaces of oppression and exclusion. This body of scholarship illustrates the need for a revised conception of the rural superintendency as a position responsive to external infl uences, while simultaneously attuned to within-community spaces of marginalization and inequity. Inattention to these intra-community spaces of marginalization threatens the utility of a critical placeconscious framework for leadership (Nespor, 2008). In this conceptual article, we identify constructs for understanding the work of rural educational leaders in two iterations, or waves, of literature since the 1960s: (1) insider/ outsider and (2) place-conscious/critical place-conscious. We interrogate a focused set of publications that have driven or researched in practice these constructs. We fi nd that the second wave—place-conscious/critical place-conscious— is largely prescriptive, and recent research attempting to use critical place-conscious leadership, coupled with literature on rural community change and broader superintendent scholarship, has exposed weaknesses in the model. Thus, we argue for a revised model of critical place-conscious leadership that better addresses the heterogeneity within rural communities, the rapidly changing context of rural communities, and the realities of contemporary practicalities of the professionalized rural superintendent.
Culture, Community, and the Promise of Rural Education.
The work of the rural school is no longer to emulate the urban or suburban school, but to attend to its own place, Messrs. Theobald and Nachtigal maintain. Rural Schools have traditionally been tightly linked to their communities. In earlier years, the process of schooling reflected local values, local mores, local ways of being in the world. It was not unusual as late as the 1940s, for example, for small country schools scattered in various locales across the Midwest to add a month of German school" or "Norwegian school" after the regular school term. In one small North Dakota district, Catholics were dismissed early on Fridays so that the teacher could shift to the Sunday school curriculum.[1] Well into this century, rural places had their own ways. Perhaps the best documentation of this is Alan Peshkin's insightful study, Growing Up American. Chronicling the search for a new superintendent in a small rural community. Peshkin noted that the successful candidate was chosen because, as one school board member indicated, He's country." In other words, he would fit in. He would provide the kind of educational leadership that was right for the community.' While pretty much unquestioned during the 19th century, this type of allegiance to local ways came in for heavy criticism during the progressive era. "Don't under-estimate the problem of school reform," wrote Ellwood Cubberley in 1914, "because the rural school is today in a state of arrested development, burdened by education traditions, lacking in effective supervision, controlled largely by rural people, who, too often, do not realize either their own needs or the possibilities of rural education."[3] While he was writing these words, the United States was steadfastly going about the business of building big cities to surround big factories. The logic was obvious: schools should be big as well. Before the close of the progressive era, consensus was reached concerning the metaphors and mechanisms that would define public schooling in the United States. That is, the "one best system,, was identified and promulgated as the way schools should be.[4] An inherent assumption within the one best system - that bigger is better - proved to be inordinately popular, and it continues to serve as conventional wisdom regarding the proper way to formally educate young people. But we need to be clear about what is driving this particular brand of conventional wisdom. It can best be identified as a "cultural assumption" - an idea that people agree to agree on. Cultures possess many such shared assumptions. and the interesting thing about this one. for our purposes, is that appearances can solidify cultural assumptions just as easily as an empirical evidential base. if not more so. For instance, if our cities and factories are growing larger. so must our schools, right? It turns out, of course, that there is simply no evidential base to undergird this view. Yet we cling to it as some kind of basic truth. Perhaps an anecdote will make this point clearer. A front@page story in a large midwestern newspaper told of a little town with a little school that folks were campaigning to save. After reading the article, a few teachers in a nearby district that was much larger expressed their belief that all such small schools should be closed. The irony of this anecdote is that, at that very time, these teachers were working on ways to divide up their school into teams of teachers and students - schools-within-a-school - in an attempt to make themselves small. While they recognized the trend inviting places out of schools, these teachers were nevertheless unable to use this as intellectual leverage to dislodge the shallow assumption that being big means being good. Because such cultural givens are rarely ever analyzed, these teachers were not able to see the contradiction. What this anecdote demonstrates is that it is important to push the analysis of rural circumstances beyond what one sees on the surface. …