• Factors that accounted for the decline in one-room schools included the steady trend in urbanization and the concomitant decline in farming.

• The negatives of district consolidation were higher transport costs (including loss of children's availability for farm work) and less community control.

“Age grading is relevant to school district consolidation because it required coordination between classes within the same school and among other schools. All of the teachers in a multi graded 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. Age-graded schooling could tolerate much less variety among classrooms. Within the same school it was essential to have curricula in the upper grades follow from material taught in the immediately preceding grade” (Fischel 2010 p.183).

“The size of the rural school district was governed by the distance a child could reasonably be expected to walk. A homestead located close to the school had an advantage over others for prospective buyers. The children could, after doing their morning chores, walk a few hundred feet to school. This advantage over other homes and farms in the district surely became reflected in the value of the closer property. Indeed, the site for many a rural school had been donated by a local landowner, who also often got his name attached to the informal designation of the district." The donor doubtlessly had both an altruistic and a selfish motive for doing so. The selfish advantage was the proximity advantage of being closer to a school. Thus, some schoolhouses surely were established "for the purpose of enhancing the value of property in the vicinity of the schoolhouse."” (Fischel 2010 p.187).

• The age-graded school was, of course, the product of increased demand for education by both rural and urban voters. Voters surely knew that the consolidated schools would mean more expenditures, even if the labor cost per unit of education (teacher wage per student hour) was lower.

As a result, there is a lot differences in the quality of a school in an affluent community and a poorer community

• State legislation set up county commissions to propose consolidation zones. County commissions then undertook studies to see where the "organic" or natural community boundaries might be.

“Why is it that I am obligated to pay for the education of other children and why should I be concerned that equality of opportunity is upheld? That is, why should I care about the autonomy of other people?” (Murray, 2009, p. 50)

• Once the commissions came up with a plan for consolidation, they sent it up to the state education department for approval. The reason for this step was to avoid gerrymandering to grab tax base and otherwise undesirable geographic configurations.

• The belief that states simply forced consolidation on local districts may stem from the legal truism that school districts are "creatures of the state." The state's authority to regulate schooling is supposedly derived from state constitutional provisions that are specific about their grant of authority.

• Most blue-ribbon committees appointed to examine education issues came up with recommendations that were ignored or twisted so badly that the resulting reforms could hardly be said to have evolved from the original recommendations.

• Children from one-room districts in the twentieth century were usually entitled to attend a nearby high school, but the curriculum had to be fitted to the graded curriculum to enable its "eighth grade" graduates to go on to high school. Because this fit was almost always imperfect, urban public high schools usually required that the rural applicants take an entrance examination, whose function was usually served by an eighth-grade "graduation" exam.

Think of this as paying for a better overall community, rather than thinking individually

“In this way, resources are transferred to new confines when one school dis- trict breaks from another and the decisions concerning the use of those resources along with the ways in which they are distributed to students are intricately interwoven into the notion of territoriality.” (Murray 2009, p. 53)