Yesterday's Children

The one-room schoolhouse, like the outdoor privy, is vanishing,* but half the youngsters in the U.S. (13 million of them) still go to rural schools.. What kind of education are they getting? After a two-year look-around, a nine-man commission (headed by the National Education Association's Howard Dawson, the University of Chicago's Floyd Reeves) last week reported: "In thousands of school districts the education offered is not good enough--even for yesterday."

The commission found that both rural schoolchildren and their taxpaying parents are being "robbed." The larceny is not confined to poor communities. In fact, it is more apt to be an "extravagance" of wealthier districts, where for a variety of reasons (vested tax interests, local pride, standpattism) schools are not put where they should be, or consolidated when a merger would give everybody better schooling. West Virginia generally provides better rural education than richer Illinois, say the commissioners; some of the nation's best districts (e.g., in Fayette County, Ky.) and some of the worst (e.g., in Harlan County, Ky.) are neighbors.

The worst of the nation's 110,000 school districts have one thing in common: they are too small. A dozen states have 100 or more districts with fewer than ten pupils; in Kansas, half of all the districts are "undersized and anemic." If three small districts combined, they could pool enough money to hire one good teacher.

A satisfactory school district, as the commission defines it, has a minimum of 1,200 pupils, a maximum of 10.000. Each school in the district should have at least 300 students, who travel not more than 45 minutes or an hour to get there.* In elementary schools there should be at least one teacher per grade; in high schools, at least twelve teachers in all (some of them specialists: music, art, etc.). The commission would call no district satisfactory unless 90% of the students stuck until high-school graduation ("Farm boys & girls get from two to four years' less schooling than their city cousins . . . not because they have less ability but because they have poorer opportunities").

Aware that many state legislatures are now in session, the commission sent 10,000 copies of its report, A Key to Better Education, to legislators, school systems and educational groups. The commission asked the legislators to get a wiggle on, start making changes now. Said CoChairman Dawson: "Instead of 110,000 school districts, there should be 5,000."

* For news of some ligering relics, see MEDICINE.

* For 3% of the schoolkids, who live in the widest-open spaces, this would be impossible. For them the commission would stretch travel time to 1 1/2hours.

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