Big NYT Magazine feature on rural schools: out of sight, out of mind

Casey Parks, who has just joined the Washington Post, gets credit for this deeply reported story out of the Mississippi Delta.  The story appears in the Education issue of the magazine, and its headline is "The Tragedy of America's Rural Schools."  Many may see the word "tragedy" as an overstatement, but I'd argue it is not hyperbole with respect to many rural schools, including those in high-poverty and persistent poverty counties like Holmes County, Mississippi, where this story is set.  Holmes County's poverty rate is 33.8%.

The story centers Harvey Ellington, a high school senior in Holmes County, but the following excerpt focuses not on that compelling personal narrative, but rather on the funding schemes that undermine rural schools--and therefore rural students:  

Mississippi’s Department of Education doesn’t have any staff members dedicated to rural issues, and its most recent strategic plan doesn’t even include the word rural. But in 2016, when Ellington was in middle school, Republican lawmakers concluded that the best way to bolster Holmes was to consolidate it with Durant Public Schools, an even smaller and equally poor district 12 miles east, so that the districts could pool their resources.

Leaders from Holmes and Durant begged state lawmakers to consider alternatives. Several states have tried consolidation, and studies have consistently found that forced mergers rarely save much money and often don’t boost student achievement. What Holmes and Durant needed, their leaders said, was more money from the state.

Mississippi lawmakers have long known that rural districts can’t compete with wealthier suburban schools. In 1994, legislators even rolled out a new funding model designed to increase rural districts’ budgets. But the state has only fully funded the law three times in the last three decades, and leaders from Durant and Holmes argued that the shortfall had left both districts in a bind.

The story is worth a read in its entirety, not least because of the compelling cast of characters, including Ellington.  

I have written a great deal over the years about rural school consolidation (a lot of it based on events in my home county in the Arkansas Ozarks), and a bit about school funding.  

My recent academic work about rural school deficits, with Diana Flores, analyzes the situation, through the dual lenses of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic class, in New Mexico.