Michael Arnold

Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning

Thank you for inviting me. My experience with DEF began about a year and a half ago. Don Harting called me, and we had a nice conversation. Then he called back a bit later and said he'd noticed that I'd be in Baltimore for a meeting. He convinced me to drive to Salisbury, and he, Sharon, and I had a good conversation about rural education issues.

They are talking about establishing a rural education research center. We don't have a lot of really strong rural education research, and so any organization that is willing to do that, I'm willing to throw my support behind. So, thank you for having this and for this great meeting. It's a great opportunity. I also want to say just how fortunate I am to be here today, to be lumped together with Nancy Jennings and Robert Gibbs. They are just tremendous researchers. I think when you get to hear them a little bit, you'll understand that. In the country, there probably aren't two finer people studying rural education.

I wanted to talk about the issue of what is rural. I come from a part of the country--the Great Plains , which is "frontier," less than five people per square mile. I'm used to that. And there's an even smaller designation, "isolated," which is two people per square mile. So this seems pretty populous to me. And the issue of what is rural doesn't make much difference. As long as you feel like you're rural, you're rural! Bill Newland, when he was Executive Director of the National Rural Education Association, would say, "Do you think you're rural? Yeah? Well, congratulations, you're rural!"

On the other hand, it does sort of matter. Don Harting helped me think about this more clearly. He said, "The problem we run into is when we think we're talking about the same thing, and we're not." And we run into that in rural education a lot. A lot of the research in rural education comes from the southeast, and when they talk about small size, they're talking about something much different from what we're talking about in the Great Plains.

We had a paper commissioned by a guy who talked about making sure that you don't have any school districts bigger than 3,000 students. Holy cow! In our region, a district of 3,000 is a major school district. As you look at rural education, keep that in mind. Oftentimes in rural education, we define rural as "metro" and "nonmetro." But in education we want to do it by locale code. The metro designation is not as clearly defined for school districts as locale codes are. For instance, if you've been to Nebraska and to North Platte , North Platte would be considered a rural district. It's got 20,000 people in the community. That's a major population center in the middle of Nebraska . Grover, on the other hand, has a population of about 300, is way out there in the middle of nowhere, and it'd be classified as being "metro" because it happens to be in a very large county with a fairly large community. So, with us, it does make a difference what is rural when you're looking at research, but also when you're applying for grant money.

The next thing is: What is the school's role in the community? That came up in our group discussion. I think there's a fundamental question, and that is: Who is the primary client of the school? Most of my colleagues at McREL would say it's the individual student. I would say it's the community, because we pay tax dollars to our school district in order to educate kids and to get an educated workforce for the community. Our kids, and I, should get a return. That's not to say we don't care about individual kids. It just means we have to consider what's best for the community as well as for individual kids. Are we educating kids to do well in this community, or to go somewhere else? Are you only teaching college-bound kids and they're going to go somewhere else? In South Dakota, your dream is to grow up and move to Rapid City; if you grow up in Rapid City, your dream is to grow up and move to Denver. So an important issue is to figure out what is what the community needs, and are we going to focus on those needs? Are we going to define "success," and what are the outcomes? Generally, in education today, most people think of outcomes as "achievement." There are other things related, such as graduation rate, student satisfaction, and community satisfaction. So, we need to address: What do we want our kids to be able to do in the community?

An issue we see happening is that a rural community has a decision to make. (Some don't have a decision, because they're just losing population. For instance, South Dakota 's population peaked in 1930 and has been declining ever since.) For a real community, what do you do with the people moving in to your community? There's a little school district called Rush in the eastern plains of Colorado , about 50 miles from Colorado Springs. People are moving out from Colorado Springs to live in the community. The problem is you have the old ranchers who perceive that they have a particular value towards education. And then you have these new people moving in from the city--"40 acre people," because they take these big ranches and cut them down to 40 acres. And many don't put utilities on them; they just put a mobile home out there. And they perceive these people to have different education and community values. There's real struggle, between the two groups, because the old timers think, "They just don't get it," and the new people are saying, "They don't like us." I thought I heard that here you've got increasing diversity—an immigrant group that is diverse, wealthy retired people, and how does that mesh with your whole group?

The issue of school improvement: How do we get our schools to do better? I heard on NPR (National Public Radio) the other day, they were interviewing somebody who was very upset with the University of Michigan. We have this achievement gap, and we aren't doing that much to close it. She said, "It's not rocket science!" And I thought, "It's not; it's a lot harder, because you have to deal with people." The real challenge is how are we going to get leaders who can do that? That is the weak link of the educational system right now. It isn't that they aren't trying hard. It's a very difficult job to lead school improvement. So, leadership development in schools would be another issue.

There was some conversation about models for rural schools. You might look at the lesson of Chupak, Alaska. It's an area of about 27,000 square miles and a couple hundred kids. It was the first school district to win a Baldwin Quality Award. They used, as their foundation, a program called Onward to Excellence, and looked at other models, and used information from McREL. They crafted their own school improvement model. Now they're spreading it around and getting big money from the Gates foundation to do so. So, something to think about would be: what would be a school improvement model to develop for this region? Because nothing is going to fit specifically to your community. You are going to have to alter it in some way. Working across state lines…I think that would be a great contribution.

Teacher quality came up. What do we want teachers to know and be able to do? We got into providing professional development around that. Schools have all this professional development, but it doesn't relate to their school improvement goals. And one of the things that can help is to align that. And there's a bigger problem of alignment of the standards, curriculum, and instruction, which will improve learning pretty well. So that might be a service you all can think about.

Another issue for teachers is working conditions. We hear people say they want to pay teachers more. But once you have them, you have to keep them. Luckily, you don't have the problem of extreme social isolation that the Upton Schools in Wyoming have. The superintendent put his secretary on finding a potential mate for an excellent math teacher, but he still left for a bigger school in a lot bigger community. The secretary said, “He was just too picky!"

I want to follow up. This was a really excellent discussion about rural schools, a unique discussion. This was the first discussion in which consolidation didn't dominate. The problem is it overwhelms everything else. My suspicion is that consolidation would not be fruitful for you. The best analysis ever done was in Michigan, and they decided there wasn't much to be gained from that. My suggestion would be to try to stay away from that, for a while at least. Focus on what do we want our kids to know and be able to do, and how to go about that.

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