As students across the country prepare to return to school in person, many children living in rural areas will do so in schools brand-new to them and far from home. From Maine to Massachusetts to Indiana to Virginia to Wyoming, state and local legislators are advocating for school consolidation as a way to manage the costly infrastructure repairs, dropping school enrollments and teacher shortages many rural communities face.
But although consolidation plans make some sense, researchers have long warned of the ways school closures erode rural communities and hurt students, including shuttered businesses and beleaguered Main Streets.
The problem is that although such costs are well documented, policymakers continue to promote urban over rural interests. Rather than seeing rural communities as deserving of infrastructure and investments, too often decision-makers opt for policies that disregard the particular needs of rural people. In the school debates, this means consolidation.
School consolidation in rural areas began in the early 20th century as young people moved increasingly to cities and away from the farms where they were raised. Myriad forces, including tractors replacing horses, enabled farms to grow, displacing many small farmers whose children became a part of the exodus. Others left for industrial jobs and the attractions of city life.
The nation’s first generation of rural sociologists, working in predominantly Midwestern universities, went to great pains to analyze the trend of cityward migration among White rural youths. They explained as early as 1915 that it was the “fittest” who were leaving the countryside, and that “the cream was being skimmed off.” The finest rural youths, these researchers warned, were heading to cities.
And this was having a deleterious effect on rural spaces. University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross argued in 1922 that the “folk depletion” caused by talented rural youths departing the countryside left the farming areas of the Midwest “fished out ponds populated chiefly by bullheads and suckers.”
This analysis was driven by ideas of social Darwinism, which argued that the powerful people in society were innately better than the weak. Adherents of social Darwinism also believed in racial hierarchy.
According to Ross, this human resource drain meant that America was committing “race suicide.” The cities, full of supposedly less intelligent people from Southern and Eastern Europe who were immigrating to the United States in substantial numbers, would corrupt America’s White, “Anglo-Saxon” farm kids.
To stem the flow of young people from their rural landscapes, school reformers sought to improve schools — by making them more like urban ones. Stanford University’s famous education dean, Ellwood Cubberley, who had himself left Indiana’s countryside for the city, led the conversation, arguing that the great task facing the nation was to “urbanize our rural schools.” If the schools offered students an urban education, they could stay home instead of moving to cities where the racial stock of the country threatened to be diluted.