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School Districts (Fishcel (Age-Graded Schools (“An early division of…

- - - - “My overall theme is that school districts were self organizing institutions. Their chief external discipline was not the state school bureaucracy. The development of school districts was governed by the geographic mobility of the population and the rewards and penalties doled out by the market for land”
        
        “The first substantive chapter in the book (Chapter 2) describes the development of one-room school districts, which numbered more than 200,000 in 1910”
        
        “ District consolidation required in most cases the consent of the local voters, and they had to be persuaded that consolidated, age-graded schools were desirable”
      - “I argue that these institutions and their ungraded pedagogy were efficient adaptations to the rural circumstances in which the vast majority of Americans dwelled in the nineteenth century”
        
        “An ungraded system allowed children to advance their education despite attendance lapses caused by the exigencies of farm life and frequent moves by their families”
        
        “Consolidation was locally desired by a majority of voters because it plugged them into what was developing as a national system of age-graded schools that led to high school”
  - - - “district consolidations in the last forty years of the twentieth century continued to occur almost entirely in rural areas”
      - “Factors that accounted for the decline in one-room schools included the steady trend in urbanization and the concomitant decline in farming”
      - “Not only did the number of farms decline, but the average size of farms rose steadily after 1870.1 Rural birth rates, like those in cities, declined throughout the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, although rural rates have always been above urban rates." These trends were, in turn, the result of mechanization of farm work, which made large farms viable and reduced the demand for child labor”
      - “Further consolidation in rural areas could only be accomplished with the aid of nonhuman transport. By the late nineteenth century, road quality was getting better. Improvements were often specifically motivated by the need to get children to consolidated schools”
        
        “There was an undeniable economy in classroom size in consolidated schools, but this was offset by a more profound change in education. The one-room school's continuously variable school year, the curriculum tailored to local preferences, and the locally good-enough teaching staff yielded to the insistent demands for uniformity”
        
        “The modern system swamped the local economies of the age-graded classroom by dramatically increasing the amount of schooling that students were required to have”
  - - - “Cities had sufficient population density to enable a large number of children to be assembled in a single school building and divided by age group into classrooms of homogenous age groups”
    - - “The eight years of elementary school and four of high school did not become a national norm until the twentieth century”
      - “All of the teachers in a multigrade school had to agree to the curriculum in each grade. The sole teacher in a one-room school could teach skills and subjects in just about any order that she pleased. In most cases, teachers just followed textbook order, but they could select which textbook subjects would be studied”
    - - “One-room schools could not do age-graded education very well. Teachers with students in each of eight grades simply did not have time to give a separate recitation lesson in their individual grades. A teacher with students in each cohort would have to cover on average six subjects in each grade. That would be forty-eight separate recitations per five-hour day, or six minutes per lesson.3 In theory, students would be in "study hall" for seven-eighths of the school day”
    - - “Public high schools of the latter quarter of the nineteenth century transformed themselves to be able to produce graduates with these skills. In doing so, they put most of the private academies out of business, often taking over their former buildings”
  - - - “The size of the rural school district was governed by the distance a child could reasonably be expected to walk”
      - “The systemic effect of having a desirable school is different from the proximity effect”
        
        “Having a school that attracted buyers to the district as a whole would be capitalized into the value of all properties in the district, not just those close to the school”
    - - “ Superintendents, principals, and much of the teaching staff could stay long enough to establish a reputation. The lack of a consolidated, age graded system put local property owners at a disadvantage when it came to selling their homes and farms to people with children”
  - - - “Many contemporary recollections attest that the high school entrance exam was a daunting experience with a high failure rate, the prospect of which surely deterred many rural children from even taking the test”
    - - “Factors that accounted for the decline in one-room schools included the steady trend
        in urbanization and the concomitant decline in farming." The farm population declined from 39 percent of total United States.” (Fischel, W. 2010, p. 180)
- - - - “As the school population increases, teacher to pupil ratios decrease and other indicators of decline in the quality of local education emerge, affluent parents investigate other means of educating their children.” (Murray, D. 2009, p.49)
  - - - “Presumably, we are concerned that each of us, within a modern democratic society, has equality of opportunity. If this is true, then we should worry whether some children are unfairly advantaged over others in acquiring the skills necessary for equal opportunity.” (Murray, D. 2009, p.49)