Urban and Rural Schools: Overcoming Lingering Obstacles

WHICH public schools in the United States are having the toughest financial problems? Which are facing the most significant infrastructure dilemmas? Which find it most difficult to attract qualified teachers? The list of questions to which the answer is "urban and rural schools" is long and getting longer. That the two categories of schools share so many problems suggests that there may be significant advantages to collaborative efforts between them, but a substantial cultural divide works against that possibility. My aim here is to examine the historical causes of this divide on the assumption that overcoming it will be easier if it is better understood. For a large part of America's history--the first 50 years or so--we had no formal system of public education. This is not to say that there were no schools. Quite the contrary. The nation boasted a large array of private, charity, religious, and partially public-funded schools. Most of these were in the northern states, for during the first 50 years of our nation's history the institution of slavery stood as an obstacle to the proliferation of schools in the South. When the common school concept was finally deemed to be an acceptable feature of life in the United States, it was no coincidence that it began in states with major urban centers, Massachusetts in particular. However, like most large-scale societal projects, the creation of the common school was actually tied to many sets of converging circumstances. First, there was the removal of property qualifications and the extension of the male franchise in the early 1830s, a circumstance that worried the elites of early American society. Second, there was heavy foreign immigration, especially from Catholic Ireland, another development that worried American elites. Third, there was unprecedented growth in popular religious denominations--especially Methodists and Baptists--which alarmed members of the Calvinist religious hierarchy (Presbyterians and Congregationalists), who thereafter steadfastly embraced the common school concept. Last, growing levels of urbanization created the perception of a "crisis" of roaming, misdirected youths. Rural residents across the northern states, by and large, were less affected by all of these circumstances and were therefore not as likely as their urban counterparts to openly embrace a system of free common schools. This was even more true if the free school system was placed in the hands of a Presbyterian or Congregationalist cleric, as it so often was, for these denominations were a distinct minority throughout the interior states, North and South. Convincing a large rural population to go along with the statewide adoption of a free school system, complete with a state department of education located in a distant state capital and governed by a Calvinist cleric, was not an easy task. Rev. Caleb Mills of Indiana, the second superintendent of public instruction in the Hoosier state, wrote concerning the selection of his successor in 1857: "Let him be elected by popular vote, or appointed by Executive authority, or chosen by a joint ballot of the Legislature, the question would be immediately asked by thousands, not is he qualified, but is he Presbyterian? " (1) Despite considerable rural resistance, free school systems were put in place in virtually every northern state before the Civil War. This was accomplished in the Midwest with promises that there would be a great deal of local control regardless of the centralized appearance of the system. In contrast, southern state departments of education, created out of a centralized county government tradition, were invested with more power and were less inclined to be sensitive to the concept of local control. This historical dynamic still affects what happens in the name of education policy. Southern states like Texas and Florida were able to quickly operationalize statewide policy of dubious educational merit, while strong local-control states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska have resisted politically motivated education reforms. …