Inefficient, expensive, but an American icon

Imagine two school districts somewhere on America's checkered educational landscape. Each district has 1,000 students. But each one also has its own superintendent, clerical employees, and buses. And neither can afford electives in art, music, or technology.

Wouldn't you want to merge them?

Across the country, governors and state legislatures are trying to do exactly that. Here in Pennsylvania, Gov. Rendell has proposed a 12-member commission to suggest ways to consolidate some of our state's 501 school districts. Lawmakers in South Carolina, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa are devising their own consolidation schemes. In these tough times, the argument goes, bigger districts will reduce administrative costs while enhancing curricula. So citizens will get more educational bang for their property-tax buck.

Only, the citizens don't see it that way. Especially in rural areas, voters have produced a flood of letters and petitions against consolidation. And in Maine, which passed a consolidation law two years ago, opponents are mounting a campaign to repeal it.

What's going on here? Part of the issue concerns money: Many voters doubt consolidation would cut costs or fear their taxes would actually go up.

But there's more. To Americans, school is not simply an institution to educate the largest number of children at the lowest expense possible. It's a symbol of community, of the geographic spaces and face-to-face relationships that help define who we are. If we give up our schools or our districts, we relinquish part of ourselves.

Consider the one-room schoolhouse, the ultimate emblem of our nation's educational localism. As late as 1913, fully one-half of the nation's students attended a single-teacher school. And they did so over the protests of state legislators and educational officials, who railed incessantly against the inefficiency of one-room schools.

In many ways, the critics were correct. These schools had children of different ages huddling around smoky stoves and reciting long passages to their young teachers, who often possessed not much more education than the kids. Meanwhile, despite the myth of the tidy "little red schoolhouse," many were barren, dilapidated shacks. They weren't even red, because parsimonious citizens refused to pay for paint.

But the schools were theirs, and that's what mattered. Often the lone public building within miles, the one-room school hosted marriages, funerals, spelling bees, and political rallies. It also featured evening dramas and debates, the only entertainment in many parts of the country.

One Utah school staged a debate about whether "a load of seed potatoes" or "a load of women" was "most needed in the community." In North Dakota, villagers deliberated on whether "the Farm Woman Works Harder and has Less Recreation than the Farm Man." (A three-judge panel ruled for the Farm Woman.)

Not surprisingly, then, these Americans bridled when states moved to consolidate their schools. "Individuality will be lost, the pride taken in 'our' school and 'our' teacher gone," warned one parent in upstate New York, identifying herself only as a "Rural Mother."

Hers was a lost cause. By 1925, 19 states had passed laws to encourage school consolidation, often giving cash awards to districts for each single-room school they closed. Thirty-five years later, in 1960, just 1 percent of our students attended a one-room school.

But we still celebrate the tiny rural school. Look at the eight entrances to the Washington headquarters of the Department of Education, installed for a 2002 rally kicking off the federal No Child Left Behind law. Each entrance is shaped like a one-room school, featuring a slanted roof and a bell tower; the only added modern element is the slogan "No Child Left Behind," emblazoned in bold letters across all of them.

"We serve the ideal of the little red schoolhouse," then-Secretary of Education Rod Paige told the rally. "It is one of the greatest symbols of America - a symbol that every child must be taught and every child must learn, that every community was involved and every parent's input valued."

How could a one-room schoolhouse become the icon for No Child Left Behind, which gave the federal government unprecedented new powers over American education? It was illogical - even laughable. Symbolically, however, it made perfect sense. Amid the anonymity and centralization of modern life, we need emblems of the local bonds that hold us together.

That's what we get from small school districts, which continue to embody America's communal ideal. A 1,000-student district is not a one-room school, to be sure, but it is still small - and it's still ours. It may not make economic or even educational sense, but it fits snugly into the story we tell about ourselves: our roots, our purpose, and our identity. Whoever wants to change that story will have to come up with a better one.