6/26/2003 Last week's Time Magazine issue has an interesting article about Philadelphia K-12 education. In some ways K-12 absorbs more and more of my attention. States with great K-12 (Pennsylvania, Minnesota) can put the rural or inner city kids into professional school and then get them back to underserved areas. Other states in the South and increasingly in the Midwest just cannot do this. Admissions committees in states with less quality education in K-12 quickly run out of the candidates most likely to return to rural areas upon graduation and then take any rural candidate, even those unlikely to go to underserved areas.
Back to Time and Philadelphia. Seems like the large urban school districts are turning to private companies for management of schools. Some are doing well, some are doing as bad as the usual situation. Some innovations that may be working:
Smaller schools and class sizes
Separation of genders in middle school
Enhanced teacher training
Leadership that gets involved at all levels
Smaller classes in the lower grades in critical subject areas
Some rural school districts have high costs, but high graduation rates also. Not so for school districts such as Washington DC spending nearly 9000 per student per year.
Such information basically unmasks school consolidation as a smoke screen that does not work, in inner city or rural areas. Smaller schools and school districts have distinct advantages.
The other sad fact is that some inner city environments are so out of control that schools have to spend great amounts on security just to have education at all. Attempts by private concerns to cut administrative staff in this area had to be reversed.
Medical schools and other professional schools can take leadership roles with magnet schools for health professions such as at Baylor, or can facilitate education in a number of ways by working thru programs directed to teachers, students, colleges
(RHOP Links) , and more.The following document some of the reasons for special considerations for rural and underserved students.
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The State By State Education Status web page demonstrates the inequitable distribution of state education resources, with the most inexperienced teachers and the highest turnover rates of teachers and the least resources in the rural and underserved areas with the greatest challenges.·
Centralization and Regionalization decisions introduce difficulties in a systematic fashion through state government and state higher education, especially in times of recession or reductions in educational expenditures, such as now. This is documented in rural education, rural health, and rural public health.·
The Closing and Consolidation Costs in Rural Education and Consolidation and Bonding demonstrate the disastrous adoption of School Consolidation, often with coercive financing formulas by state legislatures. The impact on rural background students is suspected to be negative in educational quality and also in the potential for these students to return to small towns.The
right students, the right facilitators, the right leaders, the right actions....ORHP funded research - correction
The link in my previous email was incorrect (except for my computer), here is the missing attachment that I placed as a link below, a Federal Register page:
http://www.ruralmedicaleducation.org/RMEPost/rural_miniresearchgrants.pdf