Small Schools, Rurality and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA): Is It possible Atlantic Canadian Rural Schools Are Overperforming?

• In Event: Potential Roles for Schools in Revitalizing Rural Communities: Perspectives From Canada, the United States, and Australia

Abstract

Almost from their inception rural schools came to be defined as a problem. They were problems because they were located in spaces that classical social thought had already consigned to the dust-bin of history by the early 20th century. In the 1920s, Cubberley’s (1922) classic text on the “rural school problem” argued that professionalization of the teaching force and a systematic assault on both local control and small schools was the way to modernize rural education. Indeed, Cubberley understood the problem with rural schools to be intimately connected with the decline in rural places more generally. He was not wrong. By the 1950s the population balance in the United States had shifted in favour of urban locales adding urgency to the rural school problem. The same was the case in many advanced Western societies including Canada. Increasingly, what outmigration failed to doin rural communities, consolidation would accomplish. Small rural schools have been under threat in North America ever since.

But are rural schools actually spaces of educational underachievement and quirky local practices? Or on the other hand do they represent place-sensitive educational spaces that might be providing good quality education? While this is something many rural educators have suspected for a long time, it is difficult to prove other than anecdotally. Some time ago Paul Theobald (1997) made the apparently audacious statement that rather than looking at rural schools as a historic and contemporary “problem”, small rural schools might be seen as a solution to many key problems facing “big box” public schools in the United States. Indeed, in recent years there has been considerable interest in the deliberate creation of smaller schools in which students, particularly disadvantaged students, would receive the support they need to succeed (Corbett and Mulcahy, 2006). This movement perhaps culminated with the $50 million Gates Foundation small school initiative. While the Gates Foundation has pulled the funding from this program primarily for ideological reasons (Howley and Howley, 2010), the question remains about the small school effect and indeed the rural school effect that Theobald suggested.

This paper weaves a narrative of a curriculum project at one small school in rural Nova Scotia with an analysis of national pan-Canadian PISA data to support the argument that not only can rural schools perform well in a place-sensitive way drawing on the advantages of size and scale, but they may already be per outperforming their urban and suburban counterparts.

References

Corbett, M. and Mulcahy, D. (2006). Education on a Human Scale. Wolfville, NS: Acadia Centre for Rural Education and Sustainability.

Cubberley, E. (1922). Rural life and education; a study of the rural-school problem as a phase of the rural life problem. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

Howley, C. and Howley A. (2010). Disabusing Small-Schools Reformism: An Alternative Outlook on Scaling Up and Down. In Kovacs, P. (Ed.). The Gates Foundation and the Future of US “Public” Schools. New York and London: Routledge.

Theobald, P. (1997). Teaching the commons: Pride, place and the renewal of community. Bounder Co: Westview Press.ife problem

Author

• Michael J. Corbett, Acadia University