Small schools and their communities contribute to an important, though threatened, knowledge base. The threat adheres in underlying technologies (conceptual and material) that propel the capitalistic world towards the rationalization of all aspects of human activity. In education, this appears in the consolidation of small schools and ever larger…

This qualitative case study is focused on one high-performing urban elementary school that worked to address inequities within the school and community for two decades partly through dual language education. This neighborhood public school has been one of the district's highest-performers for the prior 15 years, was one of the first schools in the…

Over the past decade, multiple states have implemented a form of regional school district consolidation referred to as multi-district unions. Their organizational structure enables districts to retain individual school boards within regional local education agencies, all of which are overseen by a superintendent and a central board. However, no…

Boundary lines have long served as a mechanism to divide people, determining the quality of available resources, and ultimately, educational opportunity. In recent years, new school district boundaries have proliferated as local communities attempt to secede from larger school districts. In this study of Memphis-Shelby County, Tennessee, we extend…

Two separate school districts--a city one and a county one--operated independently in Durham, North Carolina, until the early 1990s. The two districts merged relatively late compared to other North Carolina cities, such as Raleigh and Charlotte. In Durham, residents in both the county and city systems vehemently opposed the merger until the county…

This essay provides an overview of the huelga schools established in Houston, Texas, in 1970. For 2 years, from 1970 to 1972, the Mexican American community opposed the Houston Independent School District's plan to integrate the schools by pairing so-called White Mexican Americans with African American students. While they protested this decision,…

Based on research involving 177 primary and secondary schools spread over thirty-eight counties in six provinces (including one autonomous region), this article explores and analyzes four modes used in rural school consolidation in China. These four modes are: complete amalgamation, annexation, crossover, and centralization-decentralization.

New Brunswick High School, which had been racially integrated for decades, became majority-minority (and soon, all minority) in the 1970s, after years of legal wrangling led hundreds of its students to depart for a new, nearly all-white high school in the adjacent suburb of North Brunswick. White suburbanites invoked "local control" to…

This paper presents a case study of the microeconomy of a typical underdeveloped village in southwest China and the role of elementary education in the village economy. The paper begins with a brief review of relevant theories on the economics of education and the current social conditions and state of education in the village under study, and…

At least as early as the nineteenth century, the two most related approaches to societal improvement have been restructuring and systemic reform. For education, that has meant school closures as well as consolidation of schools and school districts. Although there exists a substantive literature on educational reform there appears to be little…

Beginning in the late 1990s and especially since 2000, a new round of large-scale school consolidation has been introduced in rural communities in China. What is the background of this policy initiative? How has it been introduced and implemented? This article examines these issues.

The consolidation of schools and districts has been one of the most widespread education reforms of the last century; however, surprisingly little research has directly investigated the effectiveness of consolidation as a reform strategy. We provide new evidence on this topic by taking advantage of a natural experiment in Arkansas that occurred…

This case study uses the work of Michel Foucault to challenge the normalization of the principal's role and to examine the complex power relations of a rural school and community in the midst of a closure/consolidation and subsequent reopening as a charter school. In so doing, we move beyond analysis of best practices and toward a more theoretical…

This study examined whether or not enrollment, poverty rate, and district type could be used to predict cost and achievement, as measured on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test and Prairie State Achievement Exam, at the building and district levels within the state of Illinois. This study provides quantitative data that will aid educational…

This is a case study about how teacher education might better prepare rural teacher candidates for rural schools. Parents, teachers, community members, and students associated with a rural school described what is important in the preparation of teachers for today's rural schools. Their goals and wishes for their children's school and community…