A Tale of a Rural Classroom

In the last post,  I gave you an anecdote about one randomly selected urban classroom and a little insight into my three semesters in a decently well-regarded graduate program that trains and shapes educational leaders. This experience is admittedly limited, but nonetheless, I think can fairly be regarded as representative of hundreds or even thousands of classrooms and certainly thousands of hours of life for both kids and their school administrators.

Now, let  me take you back to another anecdotal experience. Once upon another decade of my life, I was a  14-year old living in a rural county. My local school district served about 1,000 kids, mostly white, from working or middle class families.  But I didn’t go to that school. 

For mostly religious reasons, I was in my fourth year at a very tiny private school located in a Baptist church quite literally in the middle of a cornfield. This was my fourth school experience in seven years (including another tiny private school, an even more rural public school, a private-but- not-as-rural school in another state, and a half-year stint spent homeschooling at my dining room table).  

There were roughly 60 kids in the whole school and eight kids  in my combined 7/8th grade class. Yeah. It was small.

Of the four of us girls who made up our little middle school class, I believe only one had a college-educated parent. My friends’ moms either stayed home or worked part-time at daycares, grocery stores, or small businesses.  Our dads were tradespeople such as carpenters, plumbers, or dairy farmers. This was not an elite private school. Most of us hadn’t been to Disney or vacations or flown in an airplane and we generally got got around in vehicles that had seen their share of the road (remember station wagons or am I dating myself?!).

Most families sacrificed quite a bit to afford the couple thousand dollars a year tuition. Teachers were paid very little (I think I can honestly say it wasn’t much more than 12k a year) and honestly the school stayed alive mostly because of heart. In fact, it actually didn’t stay alive much longer. It closed the next year after  surviving  for over 30 years. If I recall correctly, it did reopen for the younger grades for a few years, but when the Pastor and his wife finally retired after decades, the school closed with them. 

We had one room with a couple clunky computers (granted, it WAS 1994), I’m pretty sure my science teacher paid for those traumatizing worm dissections out of her own pocket, and the building was usually freezing. Or at least,  I was usually freezing. Old buildings in cornfields in western NY in January aren’t the most comfortable places. We had no special classes and I doubt many, if any of our teachers, were certified. 

However, we had a pretty solid academic curriculum. Kids learned to read and do math and write. We learned more grammar than I think anyone I’ve met to date and we sure knew our American history.

There were a few learning disabilities usually dealt with by just having the kid attend a lower level grade class. The majority of us did just fine with our core academics. In fact, after the school closed, my siblings and I  used a home correspondence program with the same curriculum and were well prepared to test out of several college level classes by our senior year. We didn’t have tutors or special classes. It was just a pretty solid, no nonsense approach to at least the skills and facts (I do take issue with some of this actually, but that’s for another time. As testing goes, it did the job).

In the urban classroom I volunteered in and discussed in the previous post, parents were poor or pretty close to it. In my rural school, parents were either poor or pretty close to it.

 In the urban classroom, the teachers and principal were motivated by money sources and testing performance, whether they liked it or not. 

In my rural school, they were motivated pretty much by heart and a mission. 

In the urban classroom, kids performed poorly. In the rural classroom, they did pretty well.   

Extrapolate my anecdote to statistics and guess what? Homeschool and private school kids perform better than public school kids on tests as an average. Public schools spend more per kid and get poorer results (and yes, the average is skewed upward because the public schools must serve very high needs kids, so that must be taken into account).

What was and is the difference? At least from my viewpoint, it wasn’t resources, money, or training. My little rural school didn’t take a dime of public money and every parent still had to pay public school taxes. No credits, no vouchers, no write-offs.   

I see these two big differences: The curriculum and parent involvement. 

I can write a whole other post, and I probably will, about how public schools, for various and sundry reasons mostly related to money and politics, will often go through whole phases of ‘experimentation’ with curriculum. Millions of kids have had reading instruction boggled beyond recognition (check out “Sold a Story” for an interesting investigation into a sample of this) when humanity has known how to teach kids to read for centuries. The same could be said for what is taught in history, government, math, etc… but  since reading is a pretty universally-agreed-upon goal of basic literacy, so you’d think how to teach it  wouldn’t be a mystery after all these centuries.

Then there are the parents.  What makes parents care, sacrifice, choose… be involved? It isn’t money or education. It might be religious beliefs or cultural experience. Successful parenting and just …living…is a lot more complex to teach than is teaching to read. Schools can only do so much. So maybe that is the mystery?

In my graduate school classes on urban education, this certainly seemed to be recognized as THE  PROBLEM. The despair of caring teachers and administrators was real and it was sad. 

“How are we supposed to be parents to these kids?! How can we get test scores up  when the kids come to school in dirty clothes and hungry?” 

But test scores was what they were supposed to focus on. Like it or not.

The problem wasn’t a nail. And the tool was still a hammer. 

And guess where those urban parents went to school?