Three Contemporary Dilemmas for Rural Superintendents

Abstract

The school district is the fundamental administrative unit of schooling in the United States and the superintendent the lead official. The nature and the challenges of this position, however, vary across the landscape. Because most superintendents lead rural districts, the challenges facing those districts are the ones that typically bedevil the superintendency overall (perhaps a surprising thought to many readers). From this vantage, we theorize such challenges overall, and illustrate the theory with three episodes: (1) the continuing threats of school and district consolidation; (2) the arrival of ethnic diversity in previously all-White rural places; and (3) the leasing of school lands for mining, with a focus on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”).

Notes

Two additional CCD categories—town remote and town distant—are also rurally relevant, and these comprise an additional 12% of all regular U.S. school districts (computed by the authors from the 2007–2008 CCD LEA data file). It's easy to see that most U.S. districts, and therefore most individual superintendents, work outside small and large cities and their affiliated suburbs, even though the schools they superintendent enroll a decided minority of U.S. students.

We use the word “State” with an uppercase “S” to refer to organized political entities in general and the word “state” with a lowercase “s” to refer to the 50 regional jurisdictions in the United States in particular.

U.S. school districts are among the most decentralized “regional organizations” in the developed world, for the time being.

The terms diverse and diversity inscribe what we regard as bogus norms: whiteness as normal and a white-skinned homogeneity as superordinate. The norms arise, at a minimum, from anthropological ignorance: the world is richly, and profitably, full of many cultures and ways of being, and, of course, of many inflections of melatonin (very much less interesting than culture, but very much more the token of human hatred and cruelty). Adopting these terms here is just a kind of shorthand; we don't think white skin is normal (it's abnormal, worldwide) and we don't find the standardized, national American culture to be all that good. In our experience, however, local rural cultures diverge from the national culture, sometimes dramatically. For the contested ground, as illustrated in just one alternative rural culture, see Biggers (2006) and Hennen (1996).

The United States of 2014 is arguably “less racist” than the United States of 1954, but the legacy of 1954 (and of the previous 300 years in the historical American practices of slavery and genocide) lingers institutionally. Other sorts of injurious discrimination and prejudice are just as operant across the nation as in 1954, if not more so: social class prejudice directed at the poor and the working class, for instance. The Rhodes study, it seems, shows how institutional racism fuses with class prejudice in a contemporary rural school and community.

See, for example, our earlier mention about Ruby Payne–inspired “poverty training.”

Readers will likely have heard of the environmental concerns related to fracking, which center on the nature and handling of the massive solutions of water and chemicals needed to fracture shale so that it releases its closely held gas and oil. Economically speaking, however, the energy inputs needed to access this new energy source are far greater than for conventional drilling (which does not involve the handling of millions of gallons of contaminated water per well).

“Cheap energy” doesn't mean low prices for fuel; rather, fossil energy is “cheap” in comparison with using human and animal muscles, the energy source prior to the Industrial Revolution (Heinberg, 2005). Imagine carrying a 50-pound sack two miles instead of driving it the same distance on a pickup truck. Living in the country, one occasionally experiences the contrast. It's illuminating: the truck transport is quick and easy; the sack on the back is brutal work. The truck, costing about $1.00 to operate and taking a few minutes instead of the brutal hour, is cheap by comparison.

The everyday life experienced by superintendents in large districts is the school bureaucracy itself; the big-city superintendent, especially, is well defended (by massive scale) against ordinary citizens and parents. The research on consolidation gives some hint about what a “large” district might be. Duncombe and Yinger (2010) find in large-scale statistical analyses that diseconomies of scale appear in district budgets when enrollment levels reach about 17,000 students. In our experience, even a district of 10,000 students feels and behaves large. A district with 3,000 students or so might be an arguable upper limit of small(ish).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aimee Howley

Aimee Howley, Ohio University professor emerita, currently is sole proprietor of WordFarmers Associates. During her academic career, she served as Associate Dean in Marshall University's and Ohio University's colleges of education. Prior to working in higher education, Dr. Howley was a special education teacher and administrator in the Jackson County Schools in West Virginia. Dr. Howley's research explores the intersection between social context and educational practice; and she has used both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate a wide range of questions relating to rural education, educational reform, school leadership, school size, and gifted education. Dr. Howley has authored or co-authored six books, numerous book chapters, and more than 50 refereed journal articles. 

Craig B. Howley

Craig B. Howley holds a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia College, a M.A. in Gifted Education from Marshall University Graduate College, and an Ed.D. in Education Administration from West Virginia University. He currently conducts research and evaluation projects for WordFarmers Associates in Albany, OH. Previously he was a professor at Ohio University, guided research in an NSF math education center, directed an ERIC clearinghouse, and worked at a Regional Education Laboratory. His primary research interests include educational scale, rural education, intellect and talent development, mathematics education, and the relationship between culture, political economy, and schooling. With Jerry Johnson and Aimee Howley he has recently published an edited book on the dynamics of social class in rural schools.

Megan Eliason Rhodes

Megan Eliason Rhodes is a teacher for the Toledo Public Schools, where she teaches general music to students in Grades K-8. Prior to her position with the Toledo Public Schools, Dr. Rhodes taught instrumental and vocal music in the Columbus (Ohio) City Schools, Rantoul (Illinois) Township High School, and Memphis (Tennessee) City Schools. Dr. Rhodes received a B.M. in Music Education from Ohio University, a M.A. in Music Education from Teachers College-Columbia University, and an Ed.D. in Educational Administration from Ohio University. She also teaches courses in Educational Foundations, Leadership, and Policy at Bowling Green State University.

Jacqueline J. Yahn

Jacqueline J. Yahn holds a B.A. in Secondary English Education from West Liberty State College and a M.A. in Integrated Teaching and Learning from The Ohio State University. She is a doctoral student at Ohio University where she is earning a degree in education administration with a focus on rural and small schools. Her dissertation research focuses on the natural gas boom in Northern Appalachia and its impact on rural schools and communities. Jacqueline is a member of the faculty at Ohio University Eastern where she serves as both the faculty advisor and instructor for the Middle Childhood Education program.