News-Record.com

That would be politically incorrect as it would highlight the poor grades from the city schools as compared to county schools. Better to bus the city kids out to county schools to marginalize success. SW High School is the perfect example of such policy.

Your letter has a lot of merit, William. I was employed by Guilford County for many years...when it was just we county folks. Our schools were successful and the teachers and kids were happy with the arrangement. We fought tooth and nail to keep our schools. We lost. Everyone lost. Merger did not save money, it did not improve schools. It was the biggest mistake the voters made..it wasn't actually a true vote. It was slanted and totally wrong.

As I have stated, when we were just county schools, it was not a surprise to see the superintendent at your door, checking on things and asking you how things were going, and actually listening to teachers and administrators.

I had not lived here long before the school consolidation "vote" happened. I'm still confused over what the choice was, since both options sounded similar and the status quo was NOT at option. I felt like maybe it was a Soviet-style election, where you get to vote, but there's only one party to vote for.

Bigger is not better. The system I grew up in has grown exponentially and the quality has declined, even in a relatively prosperous rural community. I am a proponent of lots of small schools, so each school is small enough that the principal can really interact with all teachers and children. I still have fond memories of my grade school principal, standing at the entrance greeting us all and reminding the boys to tuck in their shirts and asking how somebody's grandma was doing.

Good letter, excellent comments. Quoting from a piece I wrote for EducationNews.org:

There were 127,000 school districts in 1931, there are less than 15,000 today. School district consolidation, this menace to communities, is at last getting scholarly attention. In "School Inflation" (Education Next , Fall, 2004), Christopher Berry of the University of Chicago provides a concise history of the consolidation movement. Berry's three charts tell the story at a glance:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/3259476.html

"School Inflation" is based on Berry's unabridged report, "School Size and Returns to Education: Evidence from the Consolidation Movement, 1930-1970 ," which he produced while a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. Quoting from his first paragraph:

As late as 1930, American schools were small, community-controlled institutions, most employing a single teacher. From roughly 1930 to 1970, a rapid movement toward centralization and professionalization reduced the number of schools by more than 100,000, as more than two-thirds of the schools that existed in the former year were eliminated through a process of consolidation. The average size of a school increased fivefold over this short period. In the process school districts evolved into professionally run educational bureaucracies, some operating hundreds of schools and educating hundreds of thousands of students.

Berry does not attempt to measure the effects of school district consolidation on communities. But he does note, "As [David] Reynolds observes, in the pre-consolidation era, the local school 'was typically the key neighborhood institution binding neighbors and linking them to the larger social and cultural world around them.' Thus, consolidation of the local school district, and in particular loss of the local school, threatened a community's social cohesion and economic vitality." (Reynolds, David, There Goes the Neighborhood, University of Iowa Press, 1999)

Consolidation is bad for communities. Could it be good for children? Standardized tests were not in wide use until after the great wave of district consolidation. Berry measures instead the "value of their [children's] education in the labor market" — in isolation from other variables. In a nutshell: small schools add "quite substantial" value:

Increasing a state's average school size by 100 students was associated with a decline of one-third of a standard deviation in the rate of return to education for students educated there. In plain English, this would amount to a 3.7 percent decline in earnings for a high-school graduate.

Large districts also add value, but the district size effect is small. All things being equal, a small school in a large district would be optimal. All things are rarely equal, however. Large districts have large schools. The correlation between school size and district size — across states — "remained nearly constant at about 0.70 from 1930 to 1970." (Note: 1.00 indicates a perfect correlation; .00 indicates no relationship.)

District consolidation is toxic for neighborhoods. By Berry's yardstick, value of additional schooling in the labor market, consolidation is also bad for children because it puts them in large schools.

http://www.ednews.org/articles/32/1/Immigration-and-Schools-Part-4-Communities/Page1.html

Thanks for the link--very interesting research.

You are correct, mama...good analogy.