One in five young people in the U.S. attends a rural school. Many are poor and working-class students. With public education funding based on enrollment and birthrates declining, these small schools are already losing resources. If the number of kindergartners in a rural school is smaller next fall, administrators may have to lay off teachers in higher grades and combine grades into larger classes. They may need to cut funding from somewhere else in the stretched budget, or begin to explore whether schools at considerable distance from another should consolidate into a single school with children spending more hours on busses each day.
Wisconsin already recognizes the vulnerabilities of small rural districts and supplements funding through a legislated "sparsity" program. There, 183 districts with fewer than 100o students and fewer than 10 students per square mile get modest additional state funding resulting in modest increases in the number of students in these districts going to college.
Yet new federal support for charter school, vouchers, and other "choice" programs leaves these small, under-resourced schools and districts even more vulnerable to closure, consolidation, and budget cuts as even a small number of students leaving public school for private or charter schools diminishes resources for everyone remaining in the public school. There are simply not enough children or enough resources to support parallel systems of education in many rural communities.
In response, a group of legal scholars have proposed the creation of rural school preserves in recognition of public rural education as a public good that deserves special protections. Within these preserves, voucher or charter programs would not be allowed or at least be severely limited. Public resources would remain with public institutions that serve all children. Individual "rights" to "choice" would be secondary to the need of communities for stable institutions, just as the individual rights of hunters are subordinate to the greater public good of safety and habitat protection.
The authors speak of how such school preserves would serve communities at multiple levels: Beyond consolidating the resources that these schools need to educate all children (including disabled children that charter schools or private schools accepting vouchers may not accept), rural schools are also often vital community hubs. They serve as social centers around traditions like sports and student performances, they connect families to social safety nets, and they may be the major employers in a region. The article documents how rural school closures and consolidations are particularly harmful for low-income students and students of color.
The preprint of the full paper – rich with meaty legal analysis – is available as a free download and the arguments are well worth a read.
We can and should be talking more loudly and more often about public education as an essential public good, even while educational policy shifts to discourse about individual private benefits in the zero-sum landscape of competition and privatization.
Rural voters are already rejecting ballot measures to expand "choice" programs in their states. There is paltry evidence that kids do better in "choice" schools and emerging evidence that they often do worse. Rural students deserve advocacy – and creative solutions – from more of us and I deeply appreciate novel proposals that stretch our imaginations about what's possible in our collective lives.
